heyzap.com is a company.
Key people at heyzap.com.
heyzap.com was founded by Jude Gomila (Entrepreneur, Founder).
Heyzap was a San Francisco-based mobile gaming company that built tools and a social discovery platform for mobile gamers and developers.[2][4][5] It offered an SDK for Android and iOS enabling users to check into games, discover new titles, share tips, earn badges, and connect with communities, while providing developers with monetization services like advertising, mediation, cross-promotion, and analytics via a unified dashboard.[1][4][6] Heyzap served mobile gamers seeking social features and developers aiming to boost discoverability, virality, installs, and revenue optimization, addressing challenges in game discovery and monetization during the early mobile gaming boom.[1][2][4]
The company showed strong early growth, partnering with over 800 developers including PocketGems, Spacetime Studios, and BBC by 2012, handling 600k+ requests per minute, and scaling via AWS infrastructure.[1][6] It raised about $8 million across funding rounds, including from Y Combinator and Union Square Ventures, before being acquired by Fyber (later RNTS Media) for up to $45 million in 2015, expanding Fyber's reach to over 500 million MAUs.[2][5]
Heyzap was founded in 2009 (with some sources noting 2008 incorporation) by Jude Gomila and Immad Akhund, both Cambridge University alumni.[2][4][5] Gomila, with a background in Engineering and Management, had launched Sugar Global (a digital photo frame brand sold to UK retailers like Harrods) and a charity gaming site Helpthirst.com.[4] Akhund, with a Computer Science degree, worked in R&D at Bloomberg's Trading Systems and founded Revmap.com, a location-based service.[4]
The idea emerged to create the first major social network for casual mobile gamers—"the Foursquare for games" in the era of Angry Birds and Farmville—filling a gap in social discovery beyond hardcore gaming.[6] Early traction came quickly: launching apps for Android/iOS, a widget for embedding Flash games on 22,000+ websites, and partnerships with developers, leading to Y Combinator and Union Square Ventures funding in 2009, followed by Series B in 2012-2013.[4][5][6][7]
Heyzap rode the 2010s mobile gaming explosion, where casual titles like Angry Birds dominated but lacked social layers for discovery and retention, unlike location (Foursquare) or photo (Instagram) networks.[6] Its timing aligned with smartphone proliferation and app store growth, enabling developers to combat fragmentation in monetization amid rising ad networks. Market forces like AWS's elasticity favored its pivot from social features to high-scale ad tech, influencing the ecosystem by popularizing mediation SDKs and boosting UA (user acquisition) consolidation—its $45M Fyber acquisition exemplified this trend, merging social reach with ad platforms to serve 500M+ MAUs.[1][2]
Post-2015 acquisition, Heyzap integrated into Fyber's (now RNTS Media) mobile ad stack, likely enhancing mediation and UA tools amid ongoing industry roll-ups.[2][5] Looking ahead, its legacy endures in modern ad platforms prioritizing SDK simplicity and real-time scaling, shaped by trends like in-app economies, privacy regulations (e.g., ATT), and AI-driven optimization. As mobile gaming hits billions of users, Heyzap's early blueprint for social-monetization fusion positions its tech to evolve influence in consolidated giants, tying back to its roots as the pioneer dashboard for developer revenue in a fragmented app world.[1][2]
Key people at heyzap.com.
heyzap.com was founded by Jude Gomila (Entrepreneur, Founder).
