Shiraz Akmal

With more than 25 years’ in virtual reality, video games and entertainment, Shiraz Akmal has deep, hands-on experience building new entertainment businesses with cutting-edge technology. Akmal is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of SPACES, a leading immersive entertainment company that was spun out of DreamLab where Akmal formerly led business and product development for all of the virtual reality projects for DreamWorks Animation prior to 2016. He also served as VP of operations-product development for video game company THQ.

Akmal has led fundraising of over $10.2 Million dollars for SPACES with prominent industry partners and led his organization to become a Comcast Ventures Portfolio Company. SPACES is a leading location-based entertainment company with the first SPACES Center open in Irvine, CA and major partnerships announced with Songcheng, Cinemark, and Skydance.

He is a mentor for Boost VC, the pre-eminent accelerator for emerging technology, and his career highlights include directing a string of multi-million-dollar selling video game titles, including Disney Pixar’s The Incredibles, Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants and Scooby-Doo!

Akmal and SPACES co-founder Brad Herman are inventors of multiple patented VR technologies.