An app can win a download before anyone visits an app store. Digital Turbine has built a business around that small, valuable head start.
An install is easy to count. A player who returns is harder to buy. AppSamurai builds mobile growth campaigns around the difference.
Start.io began by paying Android developers for downloads. Today, it packages mobile behavior and advertising space together - and wants to carry a campaign from its first brief to its first impression.
A player wants another life. A publisher wants another dollar. Fyber built the machinery between them - then helped turn mobile advertising into an auction.
An iPhone game found a way to sell more virtual currency by giving it away. The bargain built Tapjoy into a mobile ad business, then tested what happens when a promised reward fails to arrive.
Chartboost turned the pause between two rounds of a mobile game into a marketplace. Fifteen years, two owners and billions of impressions later, the clever part is still the same: make an ad feel less like an interruption and more like an exchange.
After a billion downloads, Gismart is tuning its consumer-app machine for wellness. The clever part is not any single app - it is the system underneath them.
RevX is a programmatic demand-side platform (DSP) for mobile app marketers, using machine learning and data science to power user acquisition, retargeting, retention and monetization across in-app, web, social and connected TV inventory. Part of publicly listed Affle (India) Limited since 2019, RevX processes hundreds of billions of bid requests daily for 400+ global clients and has been repeatedly recognized in the AppsFlyer Performance Index, including top-ranked positions in iOS gaming remarketing in 2025.
AppLovin is a Palo Alto-based advertising technology company that runs an AI-driven marketplace connecting app advertisers with the users most likely to engage with them. Founded in 2011, it grew from a mobile-gaming ad network into an S&P 500 company by building AXON, a machine-learning engine that matches advertiser demand to publisher supply in real time. After selling its own games portfolio in 2025, AppLovin now focuses almost entirely on high-margin advertising software, expanding beyond gaming into e-commerce and connected TV.
InMobi is a global mobile advertising and marketing technology company founded in 2007 in Bangalore, India. It became India's first unicorn in 2011 and runs a stack of mobile-first products - the InMobi DSP, InMobi Exchange, and the consumer lockscreen and AI commerce platform Glance - reaching billions of devices and processing over a trillion ad requests monthly. In 2025 it doubled down on artificial intelligence, launching its Helix AI layer and Glance AI commerce, while preparing for a planned domestic IPO in India.