Nex

Nex (legally NEX Team Inc.) makes Nex Playground, a palm-sized console that plugs into a TV and uses a wide-angle camera plus on-device computer vision to track players' body movements — no controllers or wearables. It is pitched at families and "active play" rather than at core gamers, and sells for $299 against consoles several times that price, pairing the hardware with Play Pass, a games subscription with more than 60 titles including licensed Bluey, Barbie, Kung Fu Panda, Peppa Pig and PAC-MAN games. The company says motion data stays local to the device and every unit ships with a camera cover; it is kidSAFE+ COPPA certified and PEGI 3 rated. Founded in San Jose in 2017 by ex-Apple engineers who had already sold a startup to Apple, it first built HomeCourt, an AI basketball-training app backed by Mark Cuban and Steve Nash, before shipping Playground at Target in December 2023 for $199. It is the descendant of the Wii and Kinect lineage, and its bet is that camera tracking and on-device inference have advanced enough since Kinect's 2017 discontinuation to make the category work. In September 2026 it raised more than $150M in equity and debt to expand beyond the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland into Germany, then Japan and Korea in 2027.