A few months ago, the game industry was abuzz with speculation when it was revealed that AppLovin had agreed to sell its game portfolio to an undisclosed buyer for a whopping $900M. At a time when M&A had largely slowed to a crawl across the gaming ecosystem, this set off a flurry of speculation. When the winning bidder turned out to be Tripledot Studios (at the slightly less eye-watering price of $800M), many were left surprised, scratching their heads, or even asking themselves, “...who?”

Today, we’ll explore all things Tripledot: the company, the portfolio, the AppLovin transaction, and what comes next for the suddenly much larger mobile game publisher. 

Building the Apollo Program: Tripledot’s Background

Founded in 2017 by three friends and industry veterans, Tripledot has quietly built a reputation as a profitable, data-driven mobile gaming powerhouse. Founders Lior Shiff (CEO), Akin Babayigit (COO), and Eyal Chameides (CPO) each brought meaningful experience and complementary skills to the table: Shiff and Chameides being early members of social casino operator Product Madness (Shiff was a Co-founder), and Babayigit previously holding executive roles at King and Facebook. 

With Tripledot, the trio sought “to build the Apollo program of mobile gaming by bringing together the best people in the industry and collectively build the best environment in which to make games.”

Tripledot has always relied heavily on ad monetization to drive its business. Early titles like Coloring Book Now (2017) and Jigsaw Puzzles Now (2017) quickly gave way to more successful products like Solitaire.com (2018) and Woodoku (2020), while the growth of Triple Tile (2021) and Get Color (2021) helped to more than double the company’s downloads. 

On the strength of that early growth, Tripledot raised a $78M Series A in April 2021, followed by a $116M Series B less than a year later in February 2022. The latter round landed Tripledot the coveted unicorn status, with the company valuing at $1.4B. (Naavik covered the news at the time here.)

Interestingly, the Series B was raised with the specific intent of M&A, as Shiff told TechCrunch at the time. Just a month later, Tripledot would acquire Live Play Mobile, an operator of 24/7 live bingo broadcasts. The company also went on to purchase Warsaw-based ZephyrMobile in 2024, bringing several more puzzle and coloring apps into the fold. 

These acquisitions have been a mixed bag: Live Play Mobile quickly tripled its monthly revenue following the acquisition, later settling at a steady state of about $250K per month in IAP bookings, while ZephyrMobile’s biggest game, Get Color - Water Sort Puzzle, has seen its revenue and downloads fall off a cliff in the more than 10 months since the company was acquired (all data according to Sensor Tower).

While both of those deals were finalized for undisclosed sums, they likely pale in comparison to the magnitude of the aforementioned AppLovin transaction. Indeed, this latest move marks a major turning point for Tripledot, signaling a shift from ascendancy to leadership.

The AppLovin Deal

To quickly recap: Adtech behemoth AppLovin had been shopping around its game portfolio to potential buyers for a while (likely multiple years, according to PocketGamer) as it sought to streamline its company and focus on its most profitable business lines. By then, the adtech side of the business had massively outscaled the game portfolio, which appeared to be on a steady decline. And as of this writing, monthly downloads for AppLovin’s game portfolio were less than 10% of what they were at the start of 2022, with monthly revenue falling nearly 50% during that same time span, according to Sensor Tower. 

To hear CEO Adam Foroughi tell it, AppLovin has “never been a game developer at heart.” Rather, AppLovin had acquired its gaming studios to help train machine learning models; apparently satisfied with its progress, it has set its sights on a bigger target: TikTok.

Whatever the case, AppLovin eventually found a willing buyer in Tripledot, which agreed to take on the 10 game studios, hundreds of staff, and millions of DAU. The deal was consummated for 50% cash and 50% shares, though it’s slightly more nuanced than that. (I recommend checking out the InvestGame coverage for the full breakdown.) 

Crucially, AppLovin receives no board seat or strategic control over Tripledot as a result of the deal. Even more impressive for Tripledot is the 0.6 EV/revenue multiple — an extremely low figure relative to other mobile M&A comps. It seems likely that a motivated seller at AppLovin was forced to lower the asking price in order to entice buyers to take on the complex deal.

Assuming the deal clears regulatory approvals (a formality at this point), Tripledot will walk away with a meaningfully larger footprint: 25M DAU, 2,500 staff spread across 23 cities worldwide, and hundreds of titles to maintain: Sensor Tower shows 54 apps with over 1M downloads in CY ‘24 and 87 with more than $100K in IAP revenue during that same time period.

Tripledot instantly became one of the five largest mobile gaming publishers by revenue (grossing approximately $2B annually), now with a near 50/50 split between IAP and IAA revenue. This represents a notable diversification for the traditionally ad-heavy publisher. Importantly, Shiff has also claimed that no single title in Tripledot’s newly expanded portfolio represents more than 10% of its revenue. Despite this diversification of revenue, the newly combined portfolio is actually still solidly concentrated in the casual, puzzle, and social casino genres, even though AppLovin was well known for its 4X games from Machine Zone (which had already been downsized to a “minimal core team” in advance of the transaction).

Of course, any deal this large will require incredible execution to pull off. Shiff has previously noted the company is bringing on “a team of about 40 staff to support the group of new studios.” But the AppLovin game portfolio is still a lot for Tripledot to absorb. Not only are there likely to be massive cultural differences to overcome (both corporate and geographic), but there will be operational challenges too. 

As mentioned before, Tripledot has historically relied on ad revenue to support its growth. Asking the team to now become experts in IAP monetization will require an entirely new approach to publishing. In Tripledot’s defense, Shiff has stated that the new studios will remain independent, but some level of adjustment will inevitably be required. 

Ultimately, the enormity of this undertaking is a large factor in how Tripledot was able to afford the deal in the first place. The low upfront price comes with a long tail of operational streamlining, cultural integration, and inevitable blunders that will need to be overcome. One would normally assume that layoffs might be a part of the plan as the combined entity seeks to eliminate redundancies. 

Not so, Shiff told MobileGamer.biz. In fact, the company plans to do “more M&A down the line.”

What’s Next for Tripledot?

Digesting these new acquisitions will take time, and synergies will not emerge overnight. One area in particular that Tripledot hopes to capitalize on is artificial intelligence and machine learning, which is interesting given the aforementioned links to model training in the context of the AppLovin portfolio. 

To again quote CEO Shiff: “I think the size will allow us to double down our investments in some areas that we were passionate about. For example, as Tripledot, we’ve been investing quite a bit in AI and machine learning. Now, as a larger company, we want to increase this investment because we’ll have the ability to leverage those technologies, this investment across a larger game portfolio.” Shiff went on to cite specific use cases in art, marketing, ad creative, and gameplay personalization. Case in point: The company is listed as a customer of Layer AI, a B2B AI content creation platform that recently raised a $6.5M seed round led by the now-former Tripledot COO Akin Babayigit. (Babayigit actually stepped down from his role at Tripledot last fall, though he remains on the board.)

Beyond that, it’s natural to assume further growth is part of Tripledot’s plans. While other companies might seek to continue diversifying by building on platforms like PC or consoles, Tripledot remains narrowly focused on mobile. “Unlike some other companies, everything we do is mobile. So we know what we know, and we know what we don’t know,” Shiff has said.

Could an IPO be in the company’s future? The company certainly will have the scale to consider the option, and its large venture capital backers (many of whom invested at the height of the game industry’s COVID lockdown peaks) will want to see an exit. With many publicly traded gaming companies hitting fresh all-time highs at the time of writing this article, perhaps the markets are ready. For now, Tripledot will have its hands full with change management and corporate restructuring. 

At this juncture, it’s difficult to say whether the publisher will prove itself an expert operator capable of navigating this transition. The remaining founders are clearly experienced and have a strong track record at both Tripledot and Product Madness. Tripledot appears to have plenty of runway (especially given the favorable terms of the AppLovin deal) and proven genre expertise. 

I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, but it will certainly not be a quick process. Likely, the end result will be somewhere in the middle, with some of the newly acquired studios failing outright, others growing, and still others (perhaps most of them) treading water for a while.

Should the company emerge victorious in the end, though, it will be a force to be reckoned with in the rapidly shifting mobile game landscape.

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