Pokimane

Streamer · Verified

Twitch's most-followed woman streamer, loved for Valorant gameplay and warm, funny chat streams.

#33Hub rank

9.5MTwitch followers

About Pokimane

Imane Anys — Pokimane — is the queen of Twitch, and the crown isn’t close. Born May 14, 1996, in Morocco and raised in Canada, where she studied chemical engineering at McMaster University before walking away to do this full-time, she started streaming in 2013 as a diamond-ranked League of Legends player grinding the ladder with a webcam on. The personality was the differentiator — warm, quick, genuinely funny — and the audience grew from thousands to millions as the games kept changing and the channel never stopped feeling like a place you’d want to hang out.

She was early to everything that mattered. When Fortnite took over gaming in 2018, she was one of its biggest faces — Epic gave her her own in-game emote, a rarity that put her in the pantheon next to the handful of creators the game itself canonized. She rode Valorant’s launch, then Among Us — where she was one of the streamers playing live with U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in October 2020, a broadcast that made headlines far beyond gaming and showed just how much reach a Twitch room could have. The throughline wasn’t any one game. It was her.

In 2017 she co-founded OfflineTV with creators like Scarra and Disguised Toast, the content house that became streaming’s most beloved collective. The OTV era — the videos, the dynamics, the chaos — is foundational lore for an entire generation of Twitch viewers, and Pokimane was its heart. In 2023 she announced she was stepping back from the group as a member, ending a chapter that had defined the platform’s golden years. The friendships stayed; the house era was over.

The accolades stack up. Streamer of the Year at the 2018 Shorty Awards. The most-followed woman on Twitch — more than 9.5 million followers and counting, ranking her 16th overall on a platform with hundreds of millions of viewers. Another 6.6 million subscribers on YouTube. Magazine covers, ad campaigns, a mainstream profile that few streamers ever reach: she’s one of the small handful of creators whose name lands with people who’ve never watched a stream.

Then came the business moves. In 2021 she co-founded RTS, the talent management and marketing company built to represent gaming creators properly — a streamer building the infrastructure she wished had existed when she started. In 2023 she launched Myna Snacks — her own snack brand, starting with midnight mini cookies — betting on herself as a founder, not just a face. The cookie launch came with internet-wide discourse about pricing and ingredients, which she took in stride; the point was the bet itself. Sponsorships from CashApp, Verizon, and the rest kept coming, but the founder era was the real story.

In early 2024 she announced she was leaving Twitch after a decade — the platform that made her — saying she wanted to explore what comes next. The schedule got lighter, the focus shifted toward YouTube and her companies, and the era of the grinding-every-day streamer closed on her terms. The streams still happen; the room is still the coziest big room on the internet. Just on her own schedule now.

Through it all, she’s navigated the unique pressures of being the biggest woman on a platform that hasn’t always been kind to them — with a steadiness that’s become part of the legend. A decade in, through every meta, every platform shift, every generation of streamers rising and falling, Pokimane stayed. Adapting without chasing, evolving without losing the warmth that built it all.

Previously covers Pokimane because icons don’t fade. For more OfflineTV lore, check out Myth, and for the other half of the Fortnite golden age, there’s Ninja. The queen stays the queen — the stream’s live, pull up a chair.

She also understood, earlier than almost anyone, that the stream was only the front door. The YouTube channels — highlights, vlogs, the long-running podcast experiments — turned moments into archives. The fashion and beauty ventures, the acting cameos, the event hosting: every expansion was measured, and almost every one of them landed. Where other streamers chased trends into burnout, Pokimane built optionality — the quiet, unglamorous skill that separates a five-year career from a decade-plus one.

And the influence runs deeper than numbers. She became the template for what a woman could be on Twitch — not a niche, not a novelty category, but the biggest room on the platform, period. An entire generation of women streamers grew up watching her and learned the lesson she modeled every day: you don’t have to perform masculinity to win at this, you don’t have to be the loudest voice in the lobby, you just have to be relentlessly, unmistakably yourself. The warmth was the strategy. It still is.

As of 2026, the shape of the career has changed again — less grinding, more building, the founder era in full swing — but the throughline from that 2013 League of Legends stream is unbroken. A diamond-ranked teenager with a webcam became the most-watched woman in streaming history and then became something rarer: a mogul who never stopped being a streamer at heart. The crown isn’t close. It never really was.