Sid Bhatt’s company began in a space described as a 6-by-6 cubicle. He and Levon Budagyan had worked at Mint; in 2010, they started Aarki. It is an agreeable origin for an advertising business. Before asking anyone else to pay for attention, the founders had to work out what to do with very little room.
The more revealing detail is the problem Bhatt chose. Smartphones offered advertisers another place to appear, but appearing was only the beginning. A small screen could display a dull idea as efficiently as a good one. Bhatt saw an opening for technology built around creative: the message, design and interaction that might persuade a person to spend a few seconds with an ad.
A customer after the download
By June 2012, he was presenting a rather less flattering view of the install count. His talk at the Smartphone and Tablet Games Summit concerned qualified users. People might download because of a reward, misunderstand what an app offered, or simply be the wrong audience. The resulting installation could look like progress while contributing little to the business.
His proposed remedies were practical. Let people preview the app through richer advertising. Examine where valuable audiences came from. Consider actions beyond the download itself. This was an argument about expectations as much as distribution. If the advertisement and the product tell different stories, the customer gets to discover the disagreement after doing the work of installing.
There is a useful severity to that thinking. A download is a beautifully obedient number: it goes up, sits in a report and asks for no explanation. A returning customer is more demanding. Bhatt’s early presentation placed that second person inside the discussion, where the apparent bargain of a cheap install could receive some overdue scrutiny.
An editorial sketch of the qualified-user problem in Bhatt’s 2012 presentation.
Learning to build around other people
Bhatt had moved from India to the United States at a young age. Speaking with Murray Newlands in 2014, he credited access to technology and mentors with helping his development. His account of entrepreneurship also kept returning to the customer: understand the problems people bring, then make those needs part of the product.
He emphasized hiring, too. Talented colleagues could contribute more than founders initially understood. That observation carries a modest correction to the usual startup portrait, in which one determined person appears to supply the strategy, the stamina and possibly the office furniture. A company requires people whose contributions exceed the founder’s original description of the job.
In November 2011, Aarki had announced Frederic Dominioni as head of sales. Bhatt singled out his attention to publishers and advertisers and his international perspective. The announcement also described an initial investment round. Even in the early company language, selling, customer understanding and experience across markets belonged beside the software.
Hiring someone to lead sales changes the shape of a young business. Promises made to customers must survive contact with the product. Feedback must travel back to the people building it. Bhatt’s praise for a hire who understood both sides of the advertising transaction suggests the kind of conversation he wanted happening inside Aarki.
The agency and the algorithm
Aarki’s development put creative production beside media buying. Walden Venture Capital’s company history records the launch of a self-service creative studio in 2014 and integration with 13 major exchanges by 2015. Each milestone addressed a different piece of the advertiser’s work: making something to show, then finding opportunities to show it.
Consider the coordination involved. A creative tool needs to accommodate the person assembling the message. A buying system needs to decide which opportunities justify their cost. The campaign joins those decisions in public, on somebody else’s screen. A coherent product has to let information move between them without requiring the customer to become the messenger.
“The new role of agencies is designers of narrative spaces for brands.”Sid Bhatt, 2014
That phrase, which Bhatt used in 2014, gives his technical work a more expansive frame. Advertising could create a place for interaction, with room for a person to explore. For all the arithmetic surrounding delivery, the encounter still needed something worth doing. An auction can arrange an introduction; charm remains a separate assignment.
In December 2014, four Japanese agencies - Septeni, GMO TECH, Omnibus and Interspace - were announced as adopters of Aarki Encore. The platform was available in English, Japanese and Chinese. For Bhatt’s business, creative software was already crossing language and organizational boundaries, placing a California product inside other companies’ working routines.
That is a particular sort of expansion. It requires more than announcing that a market exists. Agencies have their own clients, production habits and expectations. A tool earns its place when people can use it within those obligations. International distribution becomes tangible at the point where another team decides it can get Tuesday’s work done.
When the numbers acquired names
In 2015, Aarki placed No. 19 on the Inc. 5000. The listing named Bhatt as its leader and described a creative optimization and media buying platform serving brands, agencies, app developers and publishers. The ranking supplies a dated marker for the distance between the early workspace and an operating business with a broader customer base.
Aarki’s overall rank, with Sid Bhatt listed as its leader.
A campaign for Voltage Entertainment USA gives the product story a more concrete setting. Aarki reported using weekly changes to creative and audience targeting for the app Astoria Fate’s Kiss. Its announcement said the campaign exceeded its user acquisition target by 90 percent and reduced cost per install by 60 percent.
Those were campaign claims, tied to a particular customer and period. Their interest lies in the working method: change the message, study the audience and keep adjusting. Creative decisions could be tested against customer outcomes. The artwork had a job beyond looking presentable in the meeting where the artwork was approved.
By 2019, Bhatt was discussing prediction models, real-time bidding and ecosystem partners at Programmatic Connect Seoul. About 40 industry participants attended the April event. The setting was smaller than the language of global advertising might suggest: people in a room, discussing how the machinery worked and which relationships helped it work better.
Deloitte’s 2020 Technology Fast 500 placed Aarki at No. 111, reporting 1,072 percent growth and listing Bhatt as CEO. Read alongside the earlier Inc. ranking, it adds another dated point to the company’s development. Growth had become visible over several years, rather than surviving only as a founding ambition.
The work he noticed
Bhatt’s public recommendations offer a closer view of his attention. He credited engineer Aram Danielyan with contributions to Aarki’s real-time bidding and data pipeline architecture. He also praised his ability to prioritize engineering resources around business objectives. The compliment connects a technical system with the judgment required to decide what deserves building next.
In another recommendation, Bhatt thanked Neta Kimhi for helping develop a partnership with Playtika. He recognized investment in partner success and the effort of building relationships. Put those two acknowledgments together and an organization comes into focus: some people make the infrastructure dependable; others make the collaboration worth continuing.
His approach to colleagues included granting ownership after trust had developed. He described pride in watching team members learn and take on responsibility. The detail matters because companies founded by two people eventually need decisions to happen beyond those two people. Giving others room becomes part of the operating system.
“Watching them learn from their experiences and evolve has made me very proud.”Sid Bhatt, 2016
The name on the door changes
In June 2021, Skillz announced an agreement to acquire Aarki for approximately $150 million in cash and stock. The announcement named Budagyan as CEO and put Aarki’s workforce at about 160. Bhatt’s place in this chapter is that of co-founder and founding CEO; the business had already moved into another leadership arrangement.
The acquisition closed on July 16. Skillz’s annual filing subsequently recorded total consideration of approximately $162.3 million. The distinction between an announced deal value and the figure recorded after closing is useful here. It keeps the company’s history attached to actual dates and transactions, where the accounting is less tidy than the celebratory headline.
On March 17, 2026, Aarki announced its new name, RZR, under CEO Aman Sareen. Its scope now included mobile acquisition, retargeting, connected television and influencer campaigns. The company presented the change as a way to connect learning across those activities, extending a performance advertising business onto more screens.
RZR says its infrastructure processes more than six million queries per second across four owned-and-operated data centers. Those are present-day company figures, describing the business that developed after its founding years. They belong to a different scale of operation from two colleagues sharing a cubicle, with different leaders responsible for the current choices.
Bhatt’s early question remains a useful way to read that distance. The placement is only the beginning of an advertisement’s economic life. Someone has to find the message interesting, recognize the promise and decide whether the experience deserves a return visit. His founding work brought those decisions closer together. The machinery grew; the person on the other side of the screen still gets the final vote.