Vickie
Chen

The Garage Where It Started

Before the $40 million Series B, before Solitaire Clash hit #1 on the Apple App Store with 4.8 stars across 277,000 reviews, before 400 employees across multiple continents - there was a garage in Mountain View. Handmade desks. Coffee. Ping Wang. And a question that Vickie Chen had been turning over for more than a decade in corporate gaming: what if the person who wasn't already a gamer could compete too?

Chen had earned her answer the hard way. After an MBA from Cornell's Johnson Management School in 2008 and years as General Manager of Global Publishing at Nasdaq-listed Changyou.com and Sohu.com - where she worked on TLBB, an online game that generated over $5 billion in global gross revenue - she knew the industry from the inside out. She'd seen who it was built for. And who it consistently left out.

Building Pocket7Games from Zero

In 2016, Chen and Wang founded AviaGames with a stripped-back thesis: real-money, skill-based mobile games for the vast majority of people who play games on their phones but don't identify as gamers. The company launched Pocket7Games in 2017 - an all-in-one platform tying 15+ distinct games (card, bingo, puzzle, action, math) to a single membership and wallet. One login. One balance. No context-switching. Switch from Solitaire Clash to Bingo Clash without ever leaving the ecosystem.

Early fundraising was brutal. Investors were chasing other sectors. Chen traveled through snowstorms to make pitch meetings. "When you are committed to something," she said later, "you don't stop." That stubbornness eventually unlocked backing from Makers, Galaxy, and ACME - culminating in a $40M Series B in August 2021, bringing total funding to nearly $60 million.

Games under the Avia umbrella include:

The Algorithmic Match

What sets Pocket7Games apart from pure-chance mobile gaming is the engine underneath. Avia built algorithmic matchmaking that pairs players by skill level - so a beginner isn't immediately losing to someone who's played 10,000 games. That fairness mechanic is why the platform retains users. It's also why Solitaire Clash sits at 4.8 stars on the Apple App Store with more than 277,000 reviews, and why Bingo Tour topped both the Apple and Samsung charts to win a Gold NYX Game Award in 2022.

The tournaments never stop. 450 million of them happen every month. The prize pool keeps growing - over $700 million paid to real players to date. Chen describes the model as "fair competition," not gambling - the distinction is skill. Players get better. The platform rewards that.

Career Before the Garage

Chen's path to CEO began in China with an administrative assistant role she describes as transformative. Her first manager - a woman she credits as a defining mentor - coached her in analysis, problem-solving, and independent leadership. She transitioned quickly into Business Development and eventually led profit-responsible projects on her own.

After her BA from Hohai University and her 2008 Cornell MBA, she rose to General Manager of Global Publishing at Changyou.com (a Nasdaq-listed gaming company under Sohu.com), overseeing titles that reached global audiences. TLBB, the online game she worked on during that period, went on to generate more than $5 billion in lifetime gross revenue worldwide.

By the time she left to start AviaGames, she had 13 years of gaming industry experience behind her. The plan wasn't to make a single hit game. It was to build a platform where every game was connected - a single membership, a single wallet, a single identity - and watch what happened when you lowered the barrier to competitive play.

Career Timeline

Inclusion by Design

At Avia's Mountain View headquarters, more than 40 percent of employees identify as women - many of them in leadership positions. That didn't happen by default. Chen built the team deliberately, advocating for underrepresented groups in gaming and tech with the same intentionality she applied to the game design itself.

She serves as a Corporate Ambassador for Women in Games, and has been recognized by the Silicon Valley Business Journal as a Woman of Influence. The recognition stacks up, but the more specific proof is in the org chart. A team where nearly half the employees are women, inside an industry where that figure is still rare, is a statement.

Recognition & Awards

Play for Good

Chen's pitch - "what if we could turn everyday gameplay into real-world good?" - isn't rhetorical. The company runs charity campaigns tied directly to its user base, where players' tournament activity generates donations.

The Nevada SPCA campaign raised over $220,000 for shelter animals. The Foster Love initiative contributed $136,000 to support foster youth. Chen - who has adopted two shelter cats named Jia Bao and TangTang, and whose yellow Labrador Niuniu carries the official title of Chief Guard Officer at the company - brings her personal values into the corporate ones without making it feel like a PR exercise.

Going Global

Avia has spent 2025-2026 building infrastructure for a much larger footprint. In December 2025, the company launched a German subsidiary - its first formal European presence. Three months later, it established a Global Trust Center in Singapore, a strategic anchor for Asia-Pacific operations and regulatory compliance.

The company also collaborated with California MBA students on mobile games market research in early 2026 - an unusual move that blurs the line between corporate strategy and academic partnership. Chen has always operated with an eye toward community, whether that community is players, employees, or future industry leaders.

The Casual Gamer Who Built the Platform

There's a specific irony in Chen's story worth noting: she built one of the most active competitive gaming platforms in mobile history, and she describes herself as a casual gamer. Not a hardcore player. Not someone who grew up chasing leaderboards. Someone who played Ddakji - a Korean/East Asian milk-caps skill game - as a kid in China, and recognized in that small physical game the same core mechanic she'd later encode into mobile software: skill compounds over time, and fair competition is satisfying in ways that luck-based outcomes never quite are.

That perspective - building for the player she actually is, not the player the industry imagined - is probably why Solitaire Clash has 277,000 reviews and Pocket7Games has 60 million downloads. She wasn't designing for a demographic she'd never inhabited. She was solving her own problem at scale.