YOM has been selected for the Gaming Founders Circle, a new program launched by Discord together with Techleap. The program backs a small group of the most ambitious gaming companies in the Netherlands, giving each a direct line into the people, investors, and networks that help great games scale.
It is a strong signal for where YOM sits in the industry. Discord is where players gather around the games they love: more than 90% of the people on the platform play games, and over 80 million of them gather across more than 10,000 game communities. The Netherlands is home to Discord’s European headquarters, which makes its investment in the local games community especially meaningful.
The cohort
Five companies make up the first cohort, chosen jointly by Discord, Techleap, and the Dutch Games Association. The range says a lot about how serious Dutch gaming has become, from distribution infrastructure to AI to the engines games are built on:
- VaultN: digital distribution infrastructure trusted by major publishers including Bethesda, 2K, and Take-Two.
- Poki: a web games platform reaching 90 million monthly players, grown profitably and entirely self-funded.
- MAXYMUM: AI-driven game design tools, fresh off validation at GDC this year.
- YOM: decentralized cloud gaming infrastructure where blockchain meets streaming.
- Immens: a brand-new European game engine built from the ground up with AI at its core.
We are proud to stand among them. As Constantijn van Oranje, Special Envoy for Techleap, put it: “Dutch gaming is already serious and it runs on the same frontier tech as our deeptech sector: AI and real-time compute. But no founder scales alone. Connect them to the right peers, the right capital, and the right markets, and you don’t just grow five companies, you strengthen the whole sector.”
What the program brings
The Gaming Founders Circle runs through the end of 2026 and is built for practical conversations between people building companies: what is working, what is not, and what it takes to reach the next level. For YOM that means:
- Peer learning with a small group of Dutch founders facing the same hard questions on hiring, funding, distribution, community, and going global.
- Investor access through Techleap’s network in the Netherlands and beyond, exactly when later-stage funding for studios is hardest to land.
- Connections to the gaming ecosystem through Discord.
The program builds to a trip to San Francisco in October, including a session with Discord’s leadership and an investors dinner hosted by Techleap and Prince Constantijn, and concludes with the Dutch Games Awards in November.
Gaming has always grown through connections: players sharing with other players, and developers learning from one another. Being chosen to build inside that circle, next to companies of this caliber, is exactly the kind of momentum YOM is here to turn into a faster, fairer cloud gaming network.