The AppLovin Origin

AppLovin is the largest financial outcome in the Bebo tree -- a mobile advertising company that operated in stealth mode for two years, reached a $100 million revenue run rate before most people in Silicon Valley had heard of it, and grew into an S&P 500 component with a market capitalization exceeding $160 billion by 2026.¹⁷¹⁵ Furqan Rydhan was the founding CTO from 2010 to 2013, building the technical infrastructure during AppLovin's earliest and most formative period.¹⁰¹¹ The company he helped build before leaving to join Monkey Inferno would go on to IPO at a $28.6 billion valuation in 2021 and produce eight billionaires by December 2025.⁵⁸

For Founders, Inc., AppLovin is not just a line on a resume -- it is the origin story. Rydhan's credibility as someone who built a company from nothing to a multibillion-dollar outcome at the technical level is the foundation of the venture studio's thesis: that the person who actually builds the thing is the person worth backing.¹⁸

The founding

Adam Foroughi, a UC Berkeley economics graduate who had previously worked as a derivatives trader and founded two marketing companies, co-founded AppLovin in 2012 with friends John Krystynak and Andrew Karam.²¹ But the technical work predates the formal incorporation. NFX Signal and Wellfound both list Rydhan's tenure as CTO from 2010 to 2013, placing him on the founding team before the company was officially registered.¹⁰¹¹

Foroughi's insight was that mobile advertising was broken. App developers spent money acquiring users with no way to measure whether those users actually became paying customers.³ AppLovin's approach combined customer acquisition with retargeting: it took an advertiser's existing customer data, used targeted mobile ads to find similar consumers, then tracked user behavior after download to serve personalized follow-up ads.³ Foroughi told TechCrunch in 2014 that AppLovin had "4x as many engineers as sales people, which contrasts the structure of most marketing and advertising companies."³

The company raised just $4 million from angel investors, Streamlined Ventures, and the Webb Investment Network during its stealth period.¹³ Foroughi later said he had difficulty early on selling his idea to venture capitalists, so he ran AppLovin from the start to maximize free cash flow rather than revenue growth.⁹

Rydhan's role (2010-2013)

Rydhan arrived at AppLovin from ReputationDefender (now Reputation.com), where he had been a senior software engineer and R&D team member from 2009 to 2010.¹⁰¹¹ Before that, he had already founded his own e-commerce company at 17 and worked at a dot-com at 15.²²

As founding CTO, Rydhan built AppLovin's technical infrastructure during the company's first three years -- the period when the ad-targeting engine, data pipeline, and publisher integrations were architected from scratch.¹⁰²³ The engineering-first culture that Foroughi described to TechCrunch in 2014 -- more engineers than salespeople, technology driving ad relevance -- was established during this CTO tenure.³

On the My First Million podcast in May 2021, host Shaan Puri introduced Rydhan as someone who "previously co-founded AppLovin -- a $20B+ company that recently went public."¹² The two discussed Rydhan's decision-making process for choosing which projects to work on, a question that carried weight given what AppLovin had become.¹² When Rydhan returned for episode 653 in November 2024, the podcast billed him as "$100B Founder" in the title.¹³

An Alif Summit speaker introduction on LinkedIn described Rydhan's background as: "Founding CTO of AppLovin, which had a $30B IPO in 2021."¹⁴

Stealth to scale (2012-2021)

After Rydhan's departure in 2013, AppLovin continued its stealth approach. The company emerged publicly in June 2014 with 300 customers -- including Spotify, OpenTable, and Nordstrom -- and a $100 million gross annual revenue run rate, all on just $4 million in total funding.³¹

In September 2016, Chinese private equity firm Orient Hontai Capital agreed to acquire AppLovin for $1.42 billion, but the deal collapsed after opposition from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).¹ In July 2018, KKR acquired a minority stake for $400 million, valuing the company at $2 billion.⁴²⁰ The deal marked a turning from angel-funded stealth startup to institutional-grade company: KKR's Herald Chen, who led the investment, later joined AppLovin and was awarded stock options amounting to nearly 1% of the company.⁸

AppLovin went public on the Nasdaq on April 15, 2021, raising $2 billion at a valuation of $28.6 billion.⁵ Shares opened at $70 but closed down 18.5% on the first day at $65.20, putting the market cap at approximately $23 billion.⁶ The IPO minted CEO Adam Foroughi as a billionaire with a stake estimated at $2 billion.⁷ AppLovin told investors it held about 1% of the $189 billion global mobile apps market.⁶

The stock fell below $10 per share near the end of 2022 after a pandemic glut of gaming IPOs and a postpandemic slump in ad spending by game makers.⁹ Then came Axon 2.0.

The Axon inflection

In early 2023, AppLovin launched Axon 2.0, an overhauled version of its AI-powered recommendation engine.⁹ The engineering improvements were opaque -- Barron's described them as "a black box" -- but the performance improvements were measurable and immediate.⁹ Revenue growth reaccelerated, and the stock began a sustained climb from single digits.

By the third quarter of 2024, AppLovin reported revenue of $1.2 billion (up 39% year-over-year) and adjusted EBITDA of $722 million (up 72%), with free cash flow of $545 million, up 182%.⁹ In November 2024, the company's market capitalization crossed $100 billion.⁹ Barron's ran the headline: "AppLovin Stock Is Worth $100 Billion. How Did We Miss It?"⁹

In full-year 2025, AppLovin generated total revenue of $5.5 billion, up 70% year-over-year from $3.2 billion in 2024, powered by Axon's expansion beyond gaming into e-commerce advertising.¹⁶²⁴ The software segment reported adjusted EBITDA margins of 81%.¹⁶ On September 22, 2025, AppLovin was added to the S&P 500 index, replacing MarketAxess.¹⁵

By December 2025, AppLovin had produced eight billionaires: co-founders Adam Foroughi ($26.5 billion), Andrew Karam ($10.5 billion), and John Krystynak ($5 billion); early VP of engineering Vasily Shikin ($3.5 billion); former KKR partner Herald Chen ($2.6 billion); pre-IPO investors Hao Tang ($13 billion), Ling Tang ($9.8 billion), and Eduardo Vivas ($5.7 billion).⁸ Forbes ranked AppLovin alongside Google, Meta, and Microsoft as one of the eight companies that had created the most self-made billionaires in America.⁸ As of April 2026, the market capitalization stands at approximately $162 billion with 898 employees.¹⁷²⁴

The connection to Founders, Inc.

Rydhan left AppLovin in 2013 -- eight years before its IPO -- and joined Monkey Inferno, the startup studio run by Michael Birch, where Shaan Puri was CEO.¹⁰²¹ From there he became CTO of Bebo (2015-2019), co-founded thirdweb with Jake Loo in 2020, and founded Founders, Inc. the same year.¹⁰²³

The AppLovin experience shaped the Founders, Inc. investment thesis in two ways. First, it demonstrated that a small technical team with the right product insight could build a company worth tens of billions of dollars on minimal venture capital -- AppLovin raised $4 million before reaching $100 million in revenue.³ The f.inc model of writing checks of $100,000 to $250,000 in exchange for 4-7% equity reflects this same conviction that outsized outcomes can emerge from lean, founder-driven companies.¹⁸

Second, Rydhan's departure from AppLovin before its explosive growth phase informed how Founders, Inc. thinks about the relationship between early builders and long-term outcomes. The people who build the technical foundation of a company often leave before the financial returns materialize.¹⁹ Founders, Inc. bets on these builders at the beginning -- the same stage at which Rydhan himself was building AppLovin's infrastructure -- rather than after product-market fit is proven.¹⁸

The full arc -- founding CTO of a company that became worth more than $100 billion, followed by a decade building and investing alongside other founders -- is the credibility layer beneath every check Founders, Inc. writes.¹⁴¹⁸ The 42,000-square-foot campus at Fort Mason, the hundred-plus portfolio companies, the daily lunches and office hours -- all of it traces back, at least in part, to a stealth-mode mobile ad company that a 20-something CTO helped build in 2010.¹⁹

References

1. AppLovin — Wikipedia(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
2. Adam Foroughi — Wikipedia(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
3. Mobile Ad Startup AppLovin Says It Has Reached A $100M Revenue Run Rate — TechCrunch(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
4. KKR agrees to buy stake in AppLovin at $2 billion valuation — Reuters(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
5. KKR-backed AppLovin raises $2 bln in U.S. IPO at over $28 bln valuation — Reuters