In the spring of 2012, Adam Foroughi pitched the top venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. He wanted $1 million for roughly a quarter of the company, a valuation of about $4 million. They all said no. He has since said he thinks they doubted advertising and mobile gaming more than they doubted him.
He was already a veteran of failure and of success. Foroughi was born in Sardasht, Iran, in 1980 and grew up in Laguna Niguel, California. He studied economics at Berkeley, worked as a derivatives trader, then co-founded two advertising businesses, one in 2005 and one in 2008, and sold both around 2010. Then he moved to Palo Alto and tried to build apps for consumers. In 2011 he built a dating app and a fashion app. Both failed. He has called them two terrible ideas.
His father, he has said, had built one of the most successful real estate development companies in the country, employing thousands of people.
What few people know is where the hunger comes from. Foroughi was four when his family was uprooted out of Iran. His father, he has said, had built one of the most successful real estate development companies in the country, employing thousands of people. The family lost all of it when they left. He has said he saw a part of his father lost, and that he has felt an obligation ever since to prove he can succeed. That feeling, he says, never went away. He looks for people with a chip on their shoulder, and counts himself among them.
So when the venture firms passed, he did not stop. With John Krystynak and Andrew Karam he kept AppLovin going for about eighteen months as a bootstrapped company, with $4 million from angel investors, out of sight until 2014. Early customers included OpenTable and Spotify, and by 2016 the company had reached number ten on Deloitte's Fast 500.
The next scare came in 2016, when Orient Hontai Capital agreed to pay $1.42 billion for a majority stake. The deal needed a review in Washington, and the review took over a year. Foroughi has said he did not want to be made an example of if it blew up. It was abandoned. In 2018 KKR put in $400 million for a minority stake.
On 15 April 2021 AppLovin listed on Nasdaq at $70 a share, valuing it at about $24 billion. Then the stock fell about 92 percent, to a market value he recalls at around $3.8 billion, and he has described feeling that the whole world thought the business was bad. It recovered. In 2025 revenue was $5.48 billion and net income $3.33 billion, and it joined the S&P 500 in September. A short seller attacked in February 2025, and by 6 November 2026 the market value was near $120 billion.
Foroughi has said he still wakes up anxious and checks that the business is healthy. The boy who watched his father lose a company is now the man who checks his own.