PlayAbly

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.