Oliver Yeh wanted his app to be found. He built a business on finding out.

Oliver Yeh built an app to tell people when the train was coming. Getting people to find the app proved a rather less orderly business. A timetable at least admits that there is a schedule. The market offers no such courtesy.

His app, PATHway, served the railway connecting New York and New Jersey. The effort to attract users helped set Yeh and his future co-founder, Alexey Malafeev, working on the problem that became Sensor Tower. By 2013, they had a business devoted to making app markets easier to understand.

There is a pleasing reversal in that beginning. Yeh wanted attention for something he had made. His next company would sell a better view of where attention was going. The developer’s frustration became the customer’s question.

The timetable was the easy part

The name came from another shared interest: StarCraft. In the game, a sensor tower helps reveal nearby activity. The founders borrowed the idea for a company offering competitive intelligence. Someone in the naming meeting had evidently been paying attention during the battles.

Yeh’s early ambition was wonderfully ordinary in its timing: he wanted developers to check the product in the morning. A place beside the day’s first decisions is a demanding ambition for software. It asks for usefulness often enough to become a habit.

Before Sensor Tower, his work had included platform engineering at Gilt Groupe and Appboy. His education was at MIT, where his public profile lists 2006 to 2010; his founder biography identifies electrical engineering and computer science. The route into entrepreneurship began with building software, rather than merely describing what software ought to do.

Those earlier roles put him inside businesses that depended on technical systems. Founding a company added a different responsibility: deciding which problem deserved a system in the first place. An engineer can finish a task. A founder must also persuade someone that the finished task matters.

“used by every single app developer”

Oliver Yeh’s ambition for Sensor Tower, 2014

Learning to read the shop window

Apps present an awkward spectacle. They are easy to count on a phone and difficult to understand as a market. A download, a returning user and a purchase describe different kinds of success. A high position in one ranking does not answer every question a developer might ask.

Sensor Tower’s early work addressed app-store discovery. Over time its products covered downloads, revenue, advertising and usage. Think of the progression as a widening set of questions: can people find an app, are they installing it, do they return, and how does its business compare with the alternatives?

Yeh also appeared on the company’s research bylines. In April 2018, a piece under his name examined the apps Apple chose to feature in its US iOS 11 store. Among the findings: 65 percent had been released at least a year earlier. The shop window, it turned out, had room for stock that had been on the shelves for a while.

Another December 2018 analysis put US App Store spending on Christmas Day at an estimated $54.2 million. These were attempts to make a scattered collection of individual actions legible as a market. Even the holiday unwrapping came with a spreadsheet.

In a 2017 discussion of interactive storytelling apps, Yeh pointed out the constraint beneath the excitement: applications compete for a finite amount of people’s time. It is a useful observation from someone selling information about growth. Every new opportunity still has to fit inside somebody’s day.

Seven years on a small first cheque

By March 2020, Yeh was marking seven years of Sensor Tower. The business had grown with a single $1 million seed round. Its coverage had expanded from two million apps in 2013 to more than 16 million. The customer list stretched across game developers, large companies and financial institutions.

The distinction between coverage and customers matters. Sixteen million apps were the field being studied. The people paying for access had particular decisions to make. A publisher and an investor could inspect the same market and ask very different questions of it.

In May 2020, Riverwood Capital made a $45 million growth investment. Sensor Tower described itself as already profitable. Malafeev framed the partnership as a way to strengthen execution, develop the product roadmap and bring experience in scaling a company.

For Yeh, that marked a change in the resources available to the business he had helped build. Seven years after the founding, a larger cheque arrived to support a larger operation. The funding history is more interesting when read with the years left in: customers had been doing a substantial part of the financing.

The bill for knowing more

A business selling visibility must also explain how it sees. In April 2020, Yeh and Malafeev published a statement about Sensor Tower’s data collection and privacy practices. They acknowledged that their explanation should have been clearer from the outset.

The company said it had retired related panel apps that were active but unused, updated remaining apps to identify their ownership, and was revising privacy policies to make its practices easier to understand. It also said it was reviewing data management procedures.

These details belong in the story because the product’s value depends on trust. Customers buy information about activity they cannot fully observe themselves. People whose devices contribute to a panel deserve an intelligible account of the arrangement. Those are connected obligations, even when they appear in different parts of a business.

As Sensor Tower expanded, the question of what its measurements represented remained part of the job. A good-looking chart can make a decision feel simpler. The work behind it still needs to withstand questions.

Buying a wider field of view

Sensor Tower acquired Pathmatics in 2021, adding digital advertising intelligence. In his tenth-anniversary message in 2023, Yeh identified that acquisition as a turning point in the company’s thinking. Apps and advertising offered different views of the same digital economy.

He described an ambition to combine inputs so customers could better understand a consumer’s journey from an advertisement to subsequent activity. The intended audience had broadened too. Mobile game studios were joined by businesses selling products well beyond the app stores.

That is a consequential shift for a founder. A tool designed around one professional community begins receiving questions from several. The challenge becomes deciding where the questions connect, and where a new dataset is needed to answer them.

In March 2024, Sensor Tower acquired data.ai, formerly App Annie, for an undisclosed amount. The announced combination covered more than 2,000 enterprise customers. Financing came from Bain Capital Credit, with further investment from Riverwood Capital and new investment from Paramark Ventures.

The transaction brought in customers including Microsoft, Sky and Bandai Namco, alongside a larger presence in Asia-Pacific. For the company Yeh led, it meant integrating another established business while serving the people who depended on both products.

A year later, Video Game Insights added PC and console coverage. Known for its Steam research, it had also expanded into PlayStation and Xbox data. Yeh’s company could now help publishers examine gaming markets across more of the places people play.

For a business with a StarCraft name, the gaming connection had acquired considerable substance. The task was to give publishers a broader view of sales, engagement and competition across platforms. A player may move between screens much more easily than a research system follows.

Back to the smaller developer

In May 2026, Sensor Tower announced its acquisition of AppMagic, describing it as a dedicated offering for small and medium-sized businesses. The stated audience included smaller gaming studios and independent developers. After years of expanding enterprise intelligence, the company was making an explicit provision for customers closer to its starting point.

The symmetry is appealing, though an acquisition does not settle every question of access or usefulness. The test is still whether a smaller team can find information that helps it act. Yeh’s original problem had never become obsolete: making an app does not guarantee an audience.

Then, on July 28, 2026, Sensor Tower announced a Google Ads integration powered by Pathmatics. Advertisers could access their existing Facebook, Instagram and TikTok creative assets while building Performance Max or Demand Gen campaigns. The integration had begun in beta late in 2025.

This placed part of Sensor Tower’s offering inside a working advertising tool. Rather than requiring every useful encounter to start at a research dashboard, the company was taking information into the place where a campaign gets assembled. Yeh described the aim as helping brands get more use from their creative investments.

There is a long distance between a PATH timetable and a Google Ads campaign. Yeh’s career connects them through a persistent practical concern: helping people understand what happens around the thing they have built. The trains had their routes already. Discovering the market required a different map.