Mobile Commerce Platform · Founded 2014 · New York
The AI-powered routing engine behind $25 billion in mobile retail. When you tap a link and land in the right app at the right moment - Button made that happen.
"Button: the company running the internet's mobile back office since 2014. Most consumers have no idea they exist - which is exactly how it's supposed to work."
Profile
Right now, somewhere in the world, someone tapped a link in a creator's Instagram post and landed - smoothly, instantly - inside a retail app with their item already in the cart. They bought. The creator got paid. The retailer got a customer worth three times more than the equivalent web visitor.
Button made that happen. And it happened 10 billion times in 2025 alone.
Button is the mobile commerce infrastructure company that nobody has heard of - until you start asking retailers, publishers, and creator networks how they actually make money on mobile. Then Button's name comes up immediately. The platform sits between intent and action: it takes the tap on a link and routes it, via AI-powered decisioning, to the destination most likely to convert. Usually that's a retailer's app. Apps convert 3-5 times better than mobile web. Most brands know this. Most had no reliable way to make it happen at scale. Button is that way.
"The internet of the future will be defined by actions, not ads. Button is building that internet."
- Button mission statementFounded in 2014 by five veterans of PayPal, Venmo, and Braintree, Button has grown from a deep-linking startup into the commerce plumbing behind nine out of ten of the world's largest retailers - by Forbes Global 2000 measure. Its platform powers more than 5,000 apps. Its total funding stands at roughly $85 million across multiple rounds.
The company is based in New York, runs a "RemotePlus" workplace model with around 110 employees, and has been named a Best Place to Work by BuiltIn every year since 2019. It earned the #1 spot on Crain's NYC workplace list. None of that is marketing fluff - 93% of Button employees say it's a great place to work, compared to 57% at a typical US company.
The Problem
Here's the situation in 2014, when Button's founders looked at the mobile internet and decided to build something about it: smartphone adoption was exploding, mobile traffic was overtaking desktop, and yet mobile conversion rates were a disaster. The gap between a consumer's intent to buy and their actual purchase was enormous - and widening.
The reason was structural. A publisher would promote a product with a link. The link would open a mobile website. The website was slow, clunky, and required login. The consumer abandoned. The retailer lost the sale. The publisher earned nothing. The advertiser paid for a click that bought zero.
The fix seemed obvious: send users to the app instead. Apps are fast. They have stored payment info. They convert. But doing that reliably - routing traffic into the right app, at the right moment, with accurate attribution that proved what worked - required infrastructure that simply didn't exist.
"Every mobile tap is a decision. Most platforms let it go to waste. Button decided that every tap should go somewhere worth going."
- Button platform philosophyWhat made it worse was the privacy complexity. iOS 14 changes dismantled the tracking infrastructure that mobile marketers had depended on. Cookies were dying. Deterministic attribution - knowing which ad actually drove which purchase - became increasingly difficult. Most affiliate and performance marketing tools were built for a world that no longer existed.
Button's bet was that deterministic first-party data and intelligent deep-linking could survive these changes intact. It turned out to be the right bet.
The Founders
The five people who started Button in 2014 had all been inside the mobile payments industry at its most pivotal moment. Michael Jaconi had worked at Rakuten. Mike Dudas had led mobile business development at Braintree/Venmo/PayPal and before that at Google and Disney. Chris Maddern had been a mobile engineering executive at Venmo. Siddhartha Dabral brought software engineering depth from AKQA. Stephen Milbank rounded out the founding team handling finance and operations.
They had seen from the inside how payments moved. They understood the gap between intent and transaction. And they had, between them, exactly the blend of business development, product, engineering, and finance skills to build infrastructure rather than apps.
Of the original five, Jaconi remains CEO today. Maddern, who holds patents for Button's AttendedInstall and Cart Adjust technologies, served as Chief Innovation Officer through 2022. Dudas went on to found The Block - one of cryptocurrency's most prominent news and research publications - after his time at Button. The founding team left a deep technical and relational imprint on how Button is built and how it sells.
Button by the years - a route from deep links to $25 billion
Five PayPal/Venmo alumni start Button in New York. Thesis: mobile commerce needs smart deep linking to work at scale.
Redpoint Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners invest. Button begins building out its publisher and retailer network.
Icon Ventures leads, joined by Capital One Ventures, Redpoint, Norwest, and DCM. Launch of Reach for affiliate networks.
iOS 14 tracking changes gut mobile advertising - Button's deterministic first-party data approach gains serious traction.
Surpasses $1 billion in monthly commerce driven. Launches Button for Publishers and Creator Media at Cannes Lions.
AI-powered dynamic links deployed to 50+ million creators via Linktree. Social commerce gets a performance backbone.
$2.9B in App GMS at 91% YoY growth. Named Best Mobile Marketing Platform. The scale is now undeniable.
The Platform
Button's core product is routing intelligence. Every tap on a commerce-related link is a moment of high intent. The question is whether that intent converts. Button's platform processes that tap, reads the context, and makes an instant decision: which destination gives this user the best chance of completing a purchase? Almost always, the answer is the app - if the user has it installed. If they don't, Button can route them to a web experience optimized for conversion, or into an app install flow that captures the purchase intent through to completion.
The platform's flagship product is PostTap - an AI-powered traffic optimization layer that operates after the tap and before the destination loads. PostTap optimizes for outcomes across the full funnel: app installs, app usage, and ultimately measured purchases with clean attribution.
AI-powered traffic optimization. Maximizes every tap's outcome through smart routing, app install flows, and enhanced purchase visibility.
Deep linking as a service for affiliate networks. Converts high-intent moments into lifetime value by routing affiliate traffic into apps.
Purpose-built AI that analyzes each tap's context and routes to the destination with the statistically highest conversion probability.
Retail media integration for creator campaigns. Lets creators seamlessly monetize commerce content with measurable attribution.
Full revenue stack for editorial and content publishers - affiliate, retail media, and seller budgets on one unified platform.
Publisher-first tool combining affiliate, retail media, and seller budgets. One integration, multiple revenue streams.
"App users convert 3-5 times better than mobile web users. Button exists to make sure they get to the app - every time, automatically."
- Button platform dataCommerce growth on the Button platform
CUMULATIVE AND ANNUAL GMV MILESTONES · APPROXIMATE FIGURES
* 2025 App GMS reached $2.9B at 91% year-over-year growth. The yellow bar is not ironic.
Customers & Proof
Button's customer list reads like a roll call of global retail: nine out of ten Forbes Global 2000 retailers, all ten of the top US e-commerce retailers by sales share according to eMarketer data. That includes the brands that define how Americans shop online. Uber Eats, Groupon, Sam's Club - these are companies that run on conversion, and they've made Button part of their stack.
The Sam's Club case is worth highlighting. The Walmart-owned retailer partnered with Button and Rakuten Advertising specifically to rebuild its affiliate program using Reach technology - transforming it from a web-based link farm into an app-driving, deterministic commerce engine. It's a clean case study in how the platform is positioned: not as a nice-to-have marketing tool, but as core infrastructure for retailer customer acquisition.
AI-powered dynamic links deployed to 50M+ creators (Jan 2025). Social commerce at scale.
Mobile measurement integration. Closes the attribution loop between Button's routing and downstream purchases.
AI-driven affiliate marketing integration for seamless cross-network performance tracking.
Global partnership automation. Expands Button's ecosystem for enterprise affiliate programs.
Product-level purchase data for creator marketing. Granular attribution for influencer campaigns.
Joint engagement with Sam's Club to transform affiliate program via Reach deep linking tech.
The numbers Button reports for its partners are specific enough to be credible: 175% increase in app installs, 114% higher revenue per tap, 55% increase in app-to-app sales, 40% higher mobile affiliate revenue. These aren't rounded vanity metrics - they're the kind of figures that show up in retailer quarterly reviews.
"175% more app installs. 114% higher revenue per tap. Button's numbers aren't subtle."
- Button partner performance data, 2025Recognition
Best Mobile Marketing Platform - MarTech Breakthrough 2025
Best Place to Work - BuiltIn, every year since 2019
#1 Best Place to Work in NYC - Crain's New York
Great Place to Work Certified - 93% employee satisfaction
Inc. Best Workplaces - 4 consecutive years
Why It Matters
The marketing industry's anxiety about the end of third-party cookies and the iOS privacy changes has produced a lot of noise and very few actual solutions. Button was quietly building the solution before the problem was widely understood.
The company's core infrastructure is deterministic: it uses first-party data relationships between retailers and publishers to track what actually happened, rather than probabilistic models that guess. In an environment where "attribution" has become a politely vague concept at most platforms, Button is unusually specific about what it can and cannot prove.
That specificity matters for three distinct constituencies. For retailers, it means knowing exactly which traffic sources drove app installs and purchases - not approximations, not modeled data, actual transactions. For publishers and creators, it means getting paid accurately for what they drove. For advertisers, it means having performance data that survives privacy changes.
Button's January 2025 integration with Linktree - putting AI-powered dynamic links in front of more than 50 million creators - is a signal about where the company is pointed. Creator commerce is growing fast and is structurally messy: creators promote products across platforms, audiences are fragmented, attribution is a nightmare. Button's infrastructure is exactly what that environment needs.
"Creator commerce is the next frontier of affiliate marketing, and it needs deterministic infrastructure to scale properly. Button is the plumbing."
- Button strategic positioning, 2025That moment at the beginning - the creator's post, the tap, the smooth landing in a retail app, the purchase - it looks effortless because Button spent a decade making it effortless. The routing happens in milliseconds. The attribution is clean. The creator gets paid. The retailer keeps a customer worth 3-5x what a web visitor is worth.
In 2014, this infrastructure didn't exist. Five people with strong opinions about mobile commerce and deep roots in payments decided to build it. By 2025, $10 billion in commerce was flowing through it in a single year, and nine of ten of the world's largest retailers were using it.
Button named its platform philosophy: build a better internet, fueled by commerce. That phrase is easy to dismiss as corporate aspiration. But when the company has processed $25 billion in transactions and counting, it starts to sound like a description rather than a slogan.
The internet of actions, not ads. Button is building it, one tap at a time.
Context
Button processed $10 billion in commerce in 2025 alone - that's more than the annual GDP of Iceland, Barbados, or Andorra. Put differently: Button's annual commerce volume is the size of a small country's entire economy.
Co-founder Mike Dudas went on to found The Block - one of crypto's most respected news and research publications. Button's alumni network extends across fintech, crypto, and mobile commerce.
Button's RemotePlus workplace strategy - allowing employees to work from anywhere while maintaining access to WeWork locations in LA, Miami, SF, London, and Tokyo - saved the company over $100,000 per month compared to traditional office leases.
The company holds patents on AttendedInstall and Cart Adjust - technologies developed by co-founder Chris Maddern that solve specific attribution problems when users install apps mid-purchase journey. Niche, but foundational.
Five thousand apps power the Button network. Most consumers interact with Button's routing technology without ever knowing the company exists - a feature, not a bug, of good infrastructure.
93% of Button employees say it's a great place to work. The US company average is 57%. The gap isn't small. It's probably related to 18 weeks paid parental leave and unlimited PTO, but we're just speculating.
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