For years, the economics of mobile gaming were shaped by publishers building the games, app stores claiming up to 30% of every transaction, and middlemen controlling the customer relationship. Finally, this model is starting to break apart. Recent court rulings and policy changes opened the way for direct‑to‑consumer sales, allowing publishers to keep more of their revenue and interact directly with players.
Seizing the market opportunity is Appcharge, a Tel Aviv- and San Francisco‑based company that just closed a $58 million Series B funding round led by IVP, with participation from Playrix, Creandum, Play Ventures, Glilot Capital Partners, Smilegate Investment, Moneta Ventures, BITKRAFT Ventures and Corundum Capital. With this raise, Appcharge’s total funding now stands at $89 million.
With the new funding, Appcharge plans to expand its range of products, move into new international markets and deepen partnerships with leading game publishers. Longer term, the company sees the potential to bring its direct-to-consumer model to other categories of consumer apps facing similar challenges with platform dependence.
The investment comes just nine months after its Series A. Over the past year, Appcharge processed over $500 million in transactions and grew revenue by 14x. Its platform now supports 100+ mobile titles, with publishers reporting profit increases of around 35% alongside stronger player retention.
Gaming veterans who know the pain points firsthand
Founded by Maor Sason and Roei Barassi, the company was born from the founders’ years of experience inside the mobile gaming industry at Rovio, Moon Active, Huge Games and Play Studios.
Both founders saw the limitations of the app store model, where platforms dictate monetisation, control player data, and take a share of every transaction. They set out to build what they describe as an era “beyond app stores, and even beyond web stores,” aiming to create better economics for consumer apps and more options for players.
Sason told TFN: “The need for a direct-to-consumer platform had been clear to me for years. Developers work hard to create amazing games and content, but they then have to share so much of their revenue with App Stores. When we launched Appcharge in 2022, our goal was to bring positive change to the mobile games industry by doing things differently, and now we’re seeing that happening at scale.
Roei, my co-founder, saw firsthand during his time at Moon Active that none of the available DTC vendors truly met the needs of a large-scale mobile game studio. The gap was clear, and so was the opportunity. So we set out to build the solution we wished had existed, bringing together the best expertise, talent, and innovation the Tel Aviv mobile gaming ecosystem has to offer, and delivering it as a service to mobile studios worldwide.”
Appcharge’s team of over 100 employees includes 35% women and 65% men from 14 countries, representing diverse professional backgrounds ranging from mobile gaming and monetisation experts to payments and fintech professionals.
Behind Appcharge: a fully integrated DTC toolkit
Appcharge’s platform combines fully branded web stores with a global checkout system offering multiple local payment options. It also includes a mobile in‑app payments SDK for iOS, its AppDirect solution for frictionless cross‑platform purchases, and Payment Links that enable instant purchases straight from marketing channels or messaging threads.
The main market problem Appcharge addresses is the high platform fees (30%) charged by Apple and Google for all mobile app sales. The direct-to-consumer route offers significant advantages: with Appcharge, developers pay a commission of only about 5%, instead of 30%. Appcharge recently published a report analysing over $500 million in web store transactions, including insights on payment method popularity and player purchase behaviour.
Unlike competing DTC platforms, Appcharge was built from the ground up for large-scale mobile game studios. The platform connects directly to studios’ back-ends via API, enabling real-time synchronisation between in-game events and the web store. This means offers, bundles, and promotions adapt instantly to player behaviour, without manual intervention. The technology is optimised for scale, security, and seamless payment experiences worldwide.
Karthik Ramakrishnan, Partner at IVP, says, “Appcharge is one of the fastest-growing companies we’ve seen in gaming infrastructure, and they’re only getting started. For nearly two decades, mobile game publishers had no choice but to give up a hefty cut of every transaction to the platforms that controlled distribution. What sets them apart is not just their explosive traction, but the calibre of execution from a team that knows this space inside and out”.
Appcharge wants to be at the centre of a more open and profitable ecosystem, where developers can set their terms and players benefit from better value, more choice and stronger connections with the games they love.
