Toms Ce

I’m the Founder and CEO of Applied Reality, an AI lab building 3D-conditioned world models for interactive environments. The bottleneck was never visual fidelity; it’s accuracy and cost. We generate accurate worlds that hold their state at roughly 50x lower cost than comparable approaches.

Our first product, Roam, turns text, images, or sketches into a playable, studio-quality game in minutes. It combines multi-agent codegen with a real-time diffusion model, and holds up at a large scale. The same stack has proven valuable in the simulation layer of physical AI.

There are 13 of us in SF and Europe, most doing this for the second time: technical founders, ex-Moonshot researchers, studio owners with 100+ mobile titles behind them. We’ve also acqui-hired two gaming studios (11.5M+ downloads), and recently turned down an acquisition to build something bigger.

Our backers include Long Journey, Zuckerberg Family, Jeff Dean, Sequoia & a16z scouts, and researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, xAI, Anthropic, and Cognition.

I grew up in Latvia and moved to London for King’s College. I dropped out to start a gaming company, backed by DWF Labs, with many clients before I left to build Roam.

Before that it was competitive Call of Duty and e-commerce automations & other products. I’ve lived in the US on an O-1 since August 2025.