The San Francisco Bay Area has quietly reasserted itself as the global command center for AR/VR and spatial computing. While hype cycles around the “metaverse” have cooled, investment and product development have shifted into a more durable phase: enterprise VR training, AR cloud infrastructure, mixed-reality hardware, and developer platforms that underpin the next computing layer.
What makes the region especially significant in 2026 is convergence. Hardware giants in Cupertino, platform incumbents in Menlo Park, and a dense network of VR-native startups in San Francisco and Palo Alto are now pushing in the same direction, toward immersive computing that blends digital environments with physical reality in enterprise, consumer, and industrial use cases.
Derek Belch
Founder & CEO, Strivr
Derek Belch is the founder of Strivr, one of the most established enterprise VR training companies in the United States. He previously worked within Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab before spinning out Strivr to commercialize immersive training systems.
Belch’s platform is now used by large enterprises to simulate real-world scenarios—from retail operations to high-risk safety environments—without physical constraints. His focus has shifted from early VR experimentation to scalable workforce transformation, positioning Strivr as a key infrastructure layer in enterprise learning.
Aneesh Kulkarni
Co-Founder & CTO, Strivr
Aneesh Kulkarni co-founded Strivr and leads the company’s technical architecture, building the systems that power large-scale VR deployment across distributed enterprise environments.
Kulkarni’s work has centered on solving one of VR’s hardest problems: making immersive training repeatable, measurable, and operational at scale. Under his technical leadership, Strivr has evolved from a pilot-focused startup into a production-grade training platform used across Fortune 500 organizations.
Darshan Shankar
Founder & CEO, Bigscreen
Darshan Shankar is the founder of Bigscreen, a San Francisco-based VR collaboration and social platform that enables users to meet, work, and watch content together in virtual environments.
Bigscreen has steadily evolved from a niche VR cinema app into a broader spatial computing platform focused on remote collaboration and immersive communication. Shankar’s long-term vision centers on replacing traditional video conferencing with persistent shared virtual spaces.
Phil Keslin
CTO, Niantic
Phil Keslin serves as CTO of Niantic, where he oversees the company’s technical infrastructure for large-scale AR experiences.
Keslin’s background at Google and earlier startups has been instrumental in scaling Niantic’s real-time AR systems to hundreds of millions of users globally. His work focuses on low-latency spatial computing, mapping, and world-scale multiplayer AR systems.
Brian McClendon
CTO, Niantic Spatial
Brian McClendon is a veteran of Google Maps and now serves as CTO of Niantic Spatial, Niantic’s initiative focused on advanced AR mapping and spatial computing infrastructure.
McClendon previously helped build Google Earth and Maps, and is now applying that expertise to persistent AR layers that can anchor digital objects to real-world environments with higher precision and scalability.
Inhi Cho Suh
CEO, Niantic Spatial
Inhi Cho Suh leads Niantic Spatial, the division focused on building the foundational tools for AR cloud computing.
With a background at IBM and enterprise technology leadership, Suh brings a platform-scale mindset to AR infrastructure. Her focus is on turning Niantic’s consumer AR breakthroughs into enterprise-ready spatial computing systems.
Thomas Gewecke
COO, Niantic Spatial
Thomas Gewecke, formerly of Warner Bros., serves as COO of Niantic Spatial, where he oversees commercialization and operational scaling of AR platforms.
His role reflects the increasing need to bridge entertainment, enterprise, and infrastructure in AR ecosystems as Niantic expands beyond gaming into broader spatial computing markets.
Thematic Outlook: From Experiments to Infrastructure
The Bay Area AR/VR ecosystem is no longer defined by experimentation alone. What emerges from this group is a clear transition toward infrastructure, spatial operating systems, developer platforms, and hardware-software stacks that support persistent digital environments.
From Apple’s tightly integrated hardware strategy to Niantic’s real-world AR mapping ambitions and Unity’s developer ecosystem dominance, the sector is converging on a shared objective: making spatial computing as foundational as mobile computing became in the 2010s.
Read more about the San Francisco leaders building the gaming industry from the ground up in our latest listicle.
