A marketing manager in Seoul opens a dashboard on a Monday morning. Last week she spent a small fortune across six ad channels. The old question - the one that has haunted advertising since the first billboard - hangs over the screen: which half of it worked? On her screen, AB180's Airbridge answers. Not with installs. With revenue.
For most of advertising history, that question had no honest answer. John Wanamaker's century-old joke - half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half - was less a joke than a confession. AB180 exists because, on mobile, the confession finally became unacceptable. App marketers were burning budgets across networks that each took credit for the same user, and nobody could prove who actually earned the sale.
Most attribution tools count installs. AB180 decided to count the only number that pays the bills.
— The premise, stated plainly01 / WHO THEY ARE NOWThe measurement company
Building the AI stack for full-funnel growth.
Today AB180 - in Korean, 에이비일팔공, which is just "AB180" read out loud - is one of the more serious independent players in mobile measurement. Its flagship, Airbridge, is a people-based mobile measurement partner (MMP): software that follows a user's journey from a click through install, sign-up and purchase, across web, app, PC and even connected TV. More than 600 apps and games in over 30 countries rely on it. The platform reaches over 54 million devices and offers 330+ integrations to the ad networks, warehouses and CRMs that marketers actually use.
It is, in other words, a referee for an industry full of players who would all prefer to keep score themselves.
A referee in a league where every team writes its own scoreboard.
— On why an independent MMP matters02 / THE PROBLEMThe honesty gap
Everyone wanted credit. Nobody had proof.
When a person taps an ad on Facebook, sees one on TikTok, then finally installs after a Google search, three platforms will each claim the win. Multiply that across dozens of campaigns and currencies and you get a marketing budget defended by guesswork. The deeper problem is that an install is a vanity number - it tells you nothing about whether that user ever spent a cent.
AB180's bet was that the whole game should move downstream, from installs to revenue and lifetime value. That meant tracking the messy, cross-device, post-install reality most tools politely ignored: did this user come back, subscribe, buy, and stay? Answering that honestly is harder, less flattering to ad networks, and exactly what advertisers needed.
An install is a promise. Revenue is the receipt. AB180 went looking for receipts.
— The downstream bet03 / THE FOUNDERS' BETEngineers, not ad men
Two of South Korea's top software engineers, 2015.
AB180 was founded in 2015 by Roi Nam (Sungpil Nam) and Hunjae Jung. The detail that explains a lot: both were named among South Korea's top software engineers that same year. Hunjae served as CTO and CPO and built the core technology himself; Roi, who would later land on the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list in 2020, took the CEO seat. This is a measurement company run by the people who write the measurement code - a useful trait when your entire value proposition is "trust our numbers."
The early company experimented widely, including Airbloc, a blockchain-based real-time data exchange. The experiments that stuck were the ones that answered the honesty gap most directly. Attribution won.
It is run by engineers, which is reassuring for a company whose product is "trust our numbers."
— On the AB180 leadershipThe short, busy history of AB180
04 / THE PRODUCTWhat you can actually do with it
Three tools, one job: connect spend to outcome.
Airbridge is the core. Point it at your campaigns and it stitches together the full funnel, applies AI-driven predictive lifetime value so you can judge a user's worth early, and screens out fraudulent installs before they pollute your numbers. Setup is famously quick - the company claims roughly 60 minutes with AI-assisted SDKs for iOS, Android, Web and Unity. Around it sit two more products: DeepLink Plan, which routes a user straight to the right in-app screen (even before they install), and Airflux, an AI agent that auto-runs A/B tests to squeeze more revenue from in-app ads and purchases for game teams.
Sixty minutes to set up. The hard part was never the install. It was the truth that comes after.
— On Airbridge onboarding05 / THE PROOFCustomers, capital, networks
Who trusts the referee.
The case for a measurement company is, fittingly, made in numbers. Airbridge counts among its users a mix of game makers, banks and global brands - Nexon, LG Electronics, Standard Chartered, eBay Korea, Samsung Securities, Burger King Korea, KFC, Amanotes and Alarmy among them. In 2023 the company raised a 12 billion KRW (roughly $9 million) Series B led by Storm Ventures, joined by KB Investment, SL Investment and Kolon Investment. And Airbridge is cited as one of only seven services holding direct official partnerships with the major ad networks - the credential that lets a referee actually see the field.
AB180 by the numbers
Seven services in the world have a direct line to the major ad networks. AB180 is one of them.
— On the partnership credential06 / THE MISSIONMake marketing measurable
An AI stack for full-funnel growth.
AB180 frames its mission as building the AI stack for full-funnel growth - acquisition, engagement and monetization, all measured, all optimized. The newer bets reveal the direction. Airflux hands routine optimization to an AI agent. Airbridge AI ships an MCP server so a marketer's data can be queried inside tools like Cursor and Claude Code. The throughline is consistent with 2015: take the parts of growth that ran on intuition and put a number on them.
The competitors are bigger. AB180's pitch is that it would rather be exact than enormous.
— On AppsFlyer, Adjust, Branch and the field07 / WHY IT MATTERS TOMORROWThe disappearing identifier
Privacy made measurement harder. That is the opportunity.
Apple's privacy changes and the slow death of the third-party identifier have made naive tracking impossible. Counterintuitively, that is good for a company built on rigorous, consented, people-based measurement rather than crude device fingerprinting. As the easy signals vanish, the marketers who survive will be the ones who can still prove what worked. That is precisely the gap AB180 has spent a decade learning to fill.
Back to that Monday morning in Seoul. The marketing manager closes her laptop. She knows which channel earned the revenue and which one merely claimed it. The half of advertising Wanamaker could never find is, on her screen, no longer missing. That is the whole point of AB180 - and the reason 600 companies let it keep score.