Pocket Worlds

Pocket Worlds is a social gaming company that builds and operates avatar-based virtual worlds and the technology used to run them. Its flagship title, Highrise, has been live since 2013 and offers avatar customization, social spaces and a creator economy across iOS and Android; the company reports more than 30 million registered players for Highrise. A second world, Everskies, joined the portfolio in 2021 and is a web-native fashion and avatar community aimed at a Gen-Z audience. The company positions itself as both an operator of existing social worlds and an acquirer of games and virtual worlds with established communities.

The company's technology division, Pocket Labs, develops a shared platform called World Engine, a set of tools intended to be used across all of its titles. Named components include Studio (in-game experience and content creation), Hugo (real-time data and analytics), Beacon (marketing intelligence and operations), Sentinel (automated trust, safety and player support), Forge (live content production), Cortex (unified operating layer), Bazaar (web-based loyalty and rewards storefront), Helix (experimentation and A/B testing), Chorus (community management) and Oracle (LTV and liveops forecasting). The company states that each additional title strengthens the shared platform and that modern tooling reduces the headcount required for content creation, moderation, support and marketing.

Pocket Worlds describes itself as operating with small, talent-dense teams and a long-term orientation toward the communities around its games. Earlier public descriptions frame the company as building technology that lets developers and amateur creators construct experiences, games and worlds inside its virtual universe.

Founding story

Anton Bernstein co-founded the company and serves as CEO, having previously founded LuxuryEscapes.com, where he ran product and marketing, and worked as an analyst at Insight Venture Partners and an associate at Redpoint. Co-founder and CTO Jimmy Xu, formerly a design engineer at Apple, describes spending nine years working to bring virtual worlds and the metaverse to a mainstream audience.

Business model

Pocket Worlds operates live social virtual worlds directly and layers a shared internal technology platform (World Engine, built by its Pocket Labs division) across each title, adding new worlds both by building them and by acquiring existing games with established communities, such as Everskies (joined 2021) and the AI-based UGC team Infinite Canvas (2025).

Traction

The company reports more than 75 million registered players, over 1.5 million monthly active players and more than 200,000 monthly active creators across its worlds, with Highrise accounting for over 30 million registered players on iOS and Android. Earlier figures cite seven million Highrise users in January 2021, 50 million users at the time of the Y Combinator listing, and, as of July 2023, 10 million-plus users, 35,000-plus unique items and 15 million-plus user-generated rooms. Highrise was rated 4.6/5 from 118,900 App Store reviews and 4.3/5 from 200,000 Google Play reviews as of July 2023. In January 2021 the company reported 30% of active users trading items, producing more than 50,000 transactions daily, and 6x revenue growth in 2020 over 2019.

Latest developments

Highrise partnered with Neopets on a limited-time mobile crossover reported in April 2026. In January 2025 Pocket Worlds acquired Infinite Canvas, an AI-based user-generated-content team, to expand AI-powered UGC gaming. The company was named by Fast Company as one of gaming's most innovative companies of 2025.