Heyzap

Overview

Heyzap is best remembered as a social network for gamers, but that is not the business that got acquired. Founded around 2009 by teenage-friends-turned-Cambridge-grads Immad Akhund and Jude Gomila, Heyzap pivoted repeatedly — from a widget for embedding Flash games, to a check-in-and-discover social network for players, and finally to the unglamorous but monetizable layer beneath mobile games: an advertising and user-acquisition network for developers.^[3]

That last pivot is what made Heyzap sellable. On just about $8 million in total venture funding, it built an ad-mediation platform reaching around 130 million monthly active users, and in a deal announced in late 2015 and closed in early 2016, Fyber (a subsidiary of RNTS Media) acquired it for up to $45 million.^[1][2] The lesson is about where value actually accrued: the consumer social network everyone associated with Heyzap had no durable moat, while the boring developer-infrastructure business did — and the founders' capital-efficient exit launched much bigger second acts, most notably Akhund's Mercury.

Founding Story

Immad Akhund and Jude Gomila were friends from their teenage years in London who studied at the University of Cambridge before bringing their startup to San Francisco.^[6] Heyzap started narrow — a widget service for embedding Flash games on websites — and then rode the social-gaming wave into a consumer product: a network where gamers could "check in" to games they were playing, discover new ones, and find community, styled as a kind of Foursquare for games.^[3]

The consumer vision attracted attention and capital from strong investors including Union Square Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, and Y Combinator, but it ran into a hard truth: a social layer sitting on top of games owned by others is hard to monetize and easy for platforms to threaten.^[5] The pivotal realization was that Heyzap's real, paying customers were not the gamers but the developers, who desperately needed tools to acquire users and earn ad revenue as mobile gaming exploded. Heyzap turned toward that need, building ad mediation, cross-promotion, and performance tools — and finally had a business someone would pay for.

Timeline

• ~2009: Heyzap founded by Immad Akhund and Jude Gomila; goes through Y Combinator.^[7]
• 2009–2012: Evolves from Flash-game widget to a gamer social/check-in network.^[3]
• 2012–2015: Pivots to a mobile ad-mediation and user-acquisition platform for developers; reaches ~130M MAU.^[2]
• Late 2015–Jan 2016: Acquired by Fyber/RNTS Media for up to $45M.^[1]
• 2018: Heyzap brand absorbed into Fyber's unified branding.^[4]

What They Built

Heyzap's final and defining product was an ad-mediation SDK and platform for mobile game developers. As the mobile ad ecosystem fragmented across many networks, developers needed a way to maximize revenue by routing each ad impression to whichever network would pay most, and to run cross-promotion and user-acquisition campaigns across a large audience.^[3] Heyzap provided exactly that: ad mediation, direct deals, cross-promotion, and performance tracking, integrated into developers' games through its SDK and reaching roughly 130 million monthly active users.

Earlier incarnations — the Flash-game widget and the gamer social network — were consumer products aimed at players. They generated usage and buzz but not durable revenue, because a discovery-and-community layer over other people's games has weak monetization and sits at the mercy of the platforms (app stores, Facebook) that actually own distribution.^[5] The infrastructure product was less exciting but sat where money changed hands: between developers and ad networks, taking a cut of a large and growing flow.

Market Position

Target Customers

In its winning form, Heyzap served mobile game developers who needed to monetize and acquire users — a customer with a clear budget and a concrete, recurring need, unlike the gamers of its earlier consumer phase.