PlayAbly
DefunctYC S19Founded 2022 · 5 employees · 1 known investors
Find your way into PlayAbly
977 people in our graph share verified history with the PlayAbly team — schools, employers, funds. One of them is your warm intro.
Deep Nisharunlockedknows Michael Birk · together at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (overlapped)
×4knows the team · via Banc of America Securities
knows the team · via University of Wisconsin-Madison
×3knows the team · via Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management
knows the team · via University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
knows the team · via Topspin Media
PlayAbly offers a gamified-rebate platform for Shopify-based ecommerce brands, allowing shoppers to purchase at full price with automatic entry into conditional cashback promotions tied to real-world events. The company handles risk management, compliance, and payouts, enabling merchants to maintain margin while replacing traditional discounting strategies.
Also known as Baotris
Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (S19)
PlayAbly was founded in 2022 by Michael Birk and John Cheng.
MB
Michael BirkinFounderMichael Birk is the founder of PlayAbly, which provides a gamified-rebate platform for Shopify ecommerce merchants.
JC
John ChenginCo-founder · AdvisorJohn Cheng co-founded Playnomics, an AI platform for predicting player behavior, which was acquired by Unity Technologies. He subsequently served on Unity's executive team leading Unity Analytics, a data and machine learning service for game developers.
Investors · 1
The YC application· Summer 2019 batch
Alumni Q&A
- How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
- Founders John and Angelo met at Unity Technologies, where they worked on scaling ads and gameplay personalization across mobile games. Drawing on that experience with interactive experiences and behavioral data, they built PlayAbly as a gamified engagement layer to turn passive touchpoints such as landing pages, QR codes, and email popups into branded, data-rich interactions for ecommerce and B2B brands.
- What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?
- The founders are addressing the loss of website traffic within the first seconds of a visit, where popups are ignored, forms abandoned, and retargeting is costly, leaving brands without insight into why visitors leave. Drawing on their work at Unity personalizing gameplay for over 2 billion users, they built PlayAbly to make brand touchpoints across ecommerce, B2B, and in-store settings interactive and behavior-aware, particularly in a post-cookie environment.
- What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
- The founders aim to replace passive brand touchpoints with interactive, personalized experiences, turning ads, popups, QR codes, and landing pages into games that capture attention and signal intent. Longer term, they intend to build a permission-based, gamified first-party engagement network and a PlayAbly Ad Network that distributes game experiences across partner sites, apps, and displays, spanning ecommerce, B2B, retail, and hospitality.
Summarized from the founders' answers on their Y Combinator profile.
Competitors · 5
by search overlap
Insider One10 shared keywordsInsider One is an agentic customer engagement platform that uses predictive, generative, and agentic AI to automate marketing decisioning and personalization across channels such as SMS, WhatsApp, email, and search. It serves brands and marketing teams seeking to deliver personalized, autonomous customer engagement and improve conversions.
Yotpo9 shared keywordsYotpo offers loyalty and retention software for eCommerce brands, letting them build points-based, tiered, and VIP rewards programs with digital wallet passes, integrations, and analytics. The platform serves both small businesses and enterprises and connects with eCommerce platforms, POS systems, CRMs, and marketing tools.
Commercetools9 shared keywordscommercetools provides a headless, composable commerce platform for enterprises to run B2C, B2B, B2B2C and D2C models from a unified system, handling catalog, checkout, pricing and storefront. It also offers AI-driven tools for automating commerce workflows and governing AI agents, serving large enterprises across retail, CPG, manufacturing and healthcare globally.
Talonone9 shared keywordsTalon.One provides a cloud-based incentives engine that enables businesses to design, manage, and execute loyalty programs and promotional campaigns in real-time across multiple channels and markets. The platform serves enterprise brands seeking flexible, code-free solutions for customer rewards and incentive management.
bitly.com (Link9 shared keywordsBitly is a technology company that provides link management products, including URL shortening and related connection tools for its customers. It offers a platform serving businesses and users with link creation and analytics.
Companies competing with PlayAbly for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
In the news
Frequently asked questions
- What does PlayAbly do?
- PlayAbly offers a gamified-rebate platform for Shopify-based ecommerce brands, allowing shoppers to purchase at full price with automatic entry into conditional cashback promotions tied to real-world events. The company handles risk management, compliance, and payouts, enabling merchants to maintain margin while replacing traditional discounting strategies.
- Who founded PlayAbly?
- PlayAbly was founded by Michael Birk, John Cheng in 2022.
- Who are PlayAbly's investors?
- PlayAbly's investors include Y Combinator.