user-acquisition
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The Game That Became an Ad Network
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.
The Tiny Auction Inside Every Free Game
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.
The App Factory That Traded Guitar Strings for Face Yoga
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.
RZR Is Betting the Next Great Mobile Ad Won't Stay on Your Phone
After 16 years as Aarki, the mobile ad veteran changed its name and widened its field of view. Its new pitch is simple: one learning system should follow performance from the first TV impression to the returning app customer.
Besitos Built an 8,000% Growth Machine by Paying People to Play - Now It Wants to Live Inside Every App
KashKick turned mobile-game milestones and survey clicks into cash for 3.5 million active members. The more interesting business is behind the purple app: a bootstrapped reward engine that brands can now plug into their own products.
Bagelcode Lost Two Publishers - Here Is the Global Games Playbook It Built Instead
A failed puzzle game, two vanished publishing deals and one strangely popular in-game slot pushed five Korean developers toward a different kind of studio. Bagelcode’s real product is not merely mobile games - it is a system for learning what players will return to.
Moburst Started With One Client. Now It Wants to Be Marketing’s Operating System
The mobile-first agency grew from app-store optimization into a 29-unit growth stack. Its next act combines acquisitions, Amazon expertise and proprietary AI tools under one roof.
PvX Partners
PvX Partners is a Singapore-based fintech that provides non-dilutive user acquisition (UA) financing to mobile game studios and consumer app companies. Instead of equity or traditional debt, PvX funds a portion of a company's monthly marketing spend based on the historical performance of user cohorts, sharing downside risk if those cohorts underperform. Its financing is powered by Lambda, a proprietary machine-learning underwriting and intelligence platform, allowing profitable apps to scale user acquisition budgets without giving up ownership.
RevX
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
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.
FunCraft
FunCraft is a remote-first mobile game studio founded in 2019 by former Electronic Arts and Zynga veterans. It builds friendly word and puzzle games - led by flagship title Wordgrams and Word Yatzy - designed to become daily rituals players return to for years. The studio backs a philosophy it calls 'casual forever,' pairing rigorous live operations and ad-spend experimentation with a small, senior team. By its fifth year it had crossed 7 million installs and more than $15 million in revenue.
Tenjin
Tenjin is a San Francisco-based mobile measurement partner (MMP) that gives app and game developers affordable, transparent marketing analytics. Founded in 2014 out of Y Combinator, it bundles mobile attribution, ad-revenue aggregation, LTV prediction, cost reporting, fraud prevention, and a marketing data warehouse (DataVault) into a single all-inclusive platform - built for the 'marketing scientist' who would rather analyze data than wrangle it.
AB180 - 에이비일팔공
AB180 is a Seoul-based marketing technology company building an AI stack for full-funnel app and game growth. Its flagship product, Airbridge, is a people-based mobile measurement and attribution platform (MMP) that connects ad spend to real revenue across web, app, PC and CTV, with AI-driven predictive LTV, fraud protection and deep linking. Founded in 2015, AB180 serves 600+ apps and games in more than 30 countries.
Button
Button is the leading mobile commerce enablement platform that uses AI-powered deep-linking technology to intelligently route mobile users to high-converting app destinations. Founded in 2014, Button has driven over $25 billion in cumulative commerce by connecting retailers, publishers, and creators in a performance-driven ecosystem - turning every mobile tap into a measurable, revenue-generating action.