Avia

Who They Are, Right Now

Avia is a privately held mobile gaming company headquartered in San Mateo, California. It employs around 120 people and was, until recently, known as AviaGames. The rebrand to a single name happened in 2024, and like most rebrands it was less an event than a clearing of the throat. The games, and the wallet behind them, did not change.

What Avia actually does is run tournaments. Across a portfolio of casual titles - Solitaire Clash, Bingo Clash, Bubble Buzz, 8 Ball Strike, 21 Gold, and the all-in-one platform Pocket7Games - the company puts mobile players against each other in short, skill-based competitions. Sometimes the stakes are pride. More often, they are dollars.

The Problem They Saw

Casual mobile gaming had a quiet identity crisis. On one side: slot-machine apps dressed as games of skill, where the only winning move was usually to keep paying. On the other: free puzzle games that gave you nothing but a confetti animation when you cleared a board. The middle was thin, suspiciously thin, for a category played by almost everyone with a smartphone.

The bet Avia placed was that adults playing Solitaire on the bus would, given a fair fight and a real prize, treat their phones a little more like a tennis court and a little less like a fidget toy. Competition, in other words, was an underused feature of casual gaming. The trick was making the competition feel fair.

The Founders' Bet

Vickie Chen and Ping Wang founded the company in 2017. Chen, who serves as CEO, came from a background in mobile gaming and product. Wang's expertise leaned toward the technical scaffolding required to run tournaments at scale. The two of them set up shop in the Bay Area at exactly the moment when most well-funded studios were chasing battle royales and live-service mega-titles.

Their counter-bet was almost rude in its modesty: build small games, but build the engine that makes them competitive. Assign every player a skill rating. Pair like with like. Pay out the winners. Then do it 450 million times a month.

The Product

The flagship is Pocket7Games, an app that bundles seven (then more) skill-based games into a single download with a single wallet. The wallet is the part that matters. Win at Bingo Clash, your balance moves. Spend that balance entering a Bubble Buzz tournament, the balance moves again. There is no friction between titles, which is the closest thing the category has to lock-in.

Underneath all of it is the matchmaking. Avia assigns players a skill rating, then uses that rating to find opponents of roughly equal ability. Anti-cheat technology runs in the background. None of this is glamorous, none of it is the part of the app most players will ever see, and all of it is the difference between a tournament that feels competitive and a tournament that feels rigged.

The Proof

The category has a tendency to inflate its own numbers, so it is worth being plain about what is and is not known. Public figures from Avia put the portfolio above 60 million downloads and somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 million monthly tournaments. Total disclosed funding is $48 million, with the Series B closed in August 2021. The company has not disclosed revenue or valuation publicly.

The journey has not been entirely smooth. In February 2024, a San Jose jury found that AviaGames had infringed patents held by competitor Skillz and awarded $42.9 million in damages. A separate class-action complaint alleged that some matches paired humans against bots without disclosure. Avia has contested aspects of these claims publicly. The episode is worth naming - in a category built on the promise of fair competition, the perception of fairness is the product.

The Mission

Avia's stated mission is to "unleash the competitive spirit in everyone." Translated out of the marketing register, that means lowering the bar to competition - no special hardware, no team, no Saturday tournament drive across town. Open the app, get matched, play three minutes of Solitaire, win or lose, do it again. The audience is not the existing esports community. The audience is everyone else.

The company is also one of the more visibly female-led organizations in mobile gaming, a category that does not have an abundance of those. CEO Vickie Chen has been recognized publicly for it - most recently with Platinum at the 2026 TITAN Women in Business Awards. Whether that recognition translates into a broader cultural shift in the industry is a story the industry will write, not this profile.

Why It Matters Tomorrow

Skill-based real-money gaming sits in a strange legal middle - legal in most U.S. states, contested in a few, evolving everywhere. The category will be shaped less by any one studio's roadmap than by how regulators decide to draw lines between "skill," "chance," and "gambling." Avia's portfolio is built almost entirely on the skill side of that line, which is both a strategic moat and a regulatory commitment.

What Avia gets right, and what the next several years will test, is the unglamorous middle of the stack: matchmaking, anti-cheat, payouts, and the single-wallet experience that ties seven games together. Players do not download those features. They download Solitaire. But they stay because the rest of it works.

Back to the commuter train. The phone is still in someone's hand. The tournament is twelve seconds from ending. Win, and the balance ticks up. Lose, and there is another match queued in the time it takes to look out the window. The ride is the same as it was yesterday. The game on the screen is not.