Mark Jonathan Pincus is an American Internet entrepreneur known as the founder of Zynga, a mobile social gaming company. Pincus also founded the startups Freeloader, Inc., Tribe Networks, and Support.com. Pincus served as the CEO of Zynga until July 2013, then again from 2015 to 2016.
Kaneva, LLC is a privately owned American video game company based in Atlanta, Georgia and founded in 2004 by Christopher Klaus and Greg Frame. Kaneva was a 3D Virtual World that supported 2D web browsing, social networking and shared media.
Techstars is a pre-seed investor that provides access to capital, mentorship, and other support for early-stage entrepreneurs. It was founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado. As of May 2022, the company had accepted over 2,900 companies into its accelerator programs with a combined market capitalization of $71bn USD. Techstars operates accelerator programs in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Twinity is a 3D online virtual world. Initially developed by Metaversum GmbH, it is currently held by ExitReality. The game offers its population, called Twinizens, to navigate around virtual (historical) versions of real-world cities, also called a mirror world or a Metaverse. A public beta began in September 2008, with the release of the first virtual city, Berlin, which later was followed by Singapore, London, Miami and New York. Twinity is built on BigWorld Technology and its economy is based on a free-to-play model.
Wooga is a German game software company based in Berlin that develops story-driven casual games for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets and social networks like Facebook. It has developed mobile games such as June's Journey, Pearl's Peril and Switchcraft. The company is part of the social games company Playtika. Their name comes from the words "World of Gaming".
SCVNGR (SCaVeNGeR) was a social location-based gaming platform for mobile phones. SCVNGR was part game, part game platform.
500 Global is an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator founded in 2010 by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. The fund admitted a first "class" of twelve startups to its incubator office in Mountain View, California in February 2011. They expanded to a second class of 21 in June 2011 and a third class of 34 in October 2011.
Twilio is an American company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using its web service APIs.
Brandwatch is a social media suite company owned by Cision. Brandwatch sells two different products: Consumer Intelligence and Social Media Management.
Leap Motion, Inc. was an American company that manufactured and marketed a computer hardware sensor device that supports hand and finger motions as input, analogous to a mouse, but requires no hand contact or touching. In 2016, the company released new software designed for hand tracking in virtual reality. The company was sold to the British company Ultrahaptics in 2019, which rebranded the two companies under the new name Ultraleap.
Sketchfab is a 3D modeling platform website to publish, share, discover, buy and sell 3D, VR and AR content. It provides a viewer based on the WebGL and WebXR technologies that allows users to display 3D models on the web, to be viewed on any mobile browser, desktop browser or Virtual Reality headset.
High Fidelity is an American company headquartered in San Francisco, which formerly focused on social virtual reality. As of 2020, they appear to have pivoted to 3D audio software.
Gestigon is a software development company founded in September 2011, by Sascha Klement, Erhardt Barth, and Thomas Martinetz. The company develops software for gesture control and body tracking based on 3D depth data.
Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen is a Danish-Portuguese venture capitalist. He is currently a General Partner at Balderton Capital and a Governor of the London Business School.
Jens Hilgers is a German entrepreneur who works in the esports industry. He was the founding CEO of the esports production company Electronic Sports League (ESL), and is a co-founder and the CEO of Bayes, an esports data company based in Berlin. In 2014, he co-founded G2 Esports together with Carlos "Ocelot" Rodriguez, and currently serves as its chairman. He is also the founding general partner of BITKRAFT Ventures, a global early and mid-stage investment platform for gaming, esports, and a new technology named Web3. He has been credited as an early pioneer of the esports industry.
Almaz Capital is a global VC fund headquartered in Portola Valley, California, United States investing in early stage, capital efficient technology companies in high-growth sectors. Almaz Capital focuses on disruptive deep tech companies in b2b software space, including AI/ML and Blockchain applications, IoT and Edge Computing Enablers, Cybersecurity, etc. Since its foundation the firm's portfolio has included about 50 companies, with more than 300 million US dollars invested in them.
ComplyAdvantage, founded in 2014, is a RegTech company that provides software to help detect and manage risks associated with AML and Fraud. The company uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing to help regulated organisations manage risk obligations and counteract financial crime.
Contentful is a headless content management system (CMS), founded in 2013 in Berlin, Germany by Sascha Konietzke and Paolo Negri. The company and the platform are both called Contentful. As of June 2021, the company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in Denver, Colorado and Berlin.
