Adam Foroughi

Adam Foroughi is the co-founder and CEO of AppLovin, the Palo Alto-based marketing technology company best known for its AI-driven advertising platform. AppLovin’s investor-relations materials state that he has served as CEO and a member of the board since December 2011; the company describes AppLovin as founded in 2012 by performance marketers.

Before AppLovin, Foroughi co-founded two advertising technology companies, LifeStreet Media Inc. and Social Hour Inc. Forbes reports that he was born in Iran, immigrated to California as a child, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and became a derivatives trader before starting marketing companies. AppLovin’s board biography states that he holds a B.A. in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.

Foroughi built AppLovin with an unusually capital-efficient path for a large technology company. In AppLovin’s 2021 S-1 letter, he wrote that after “countless meetings,” no venture capitalist invested in the company at the start, so the team committed to profitable growth from day one. AppLovin later received a major $400 million investment from KKR in 2018 and went public on Nasdaq in April 2021.

As an angel investor, Foroughi is listed in investor databases and funding announcements as having backed companies including Teachable, Drivetime, Merit/Sigma, SafeGraph, Neon For Life, Redemption Games, Belka Games, and tote. Public data points to seed-stage investing as the clearest pattern, with a bias toward software, apps, games, data, and consumer technology.

• Foroughi does not appear to publish a standalone angel-investing thesis, so the clearest signal comes from his company-building record and disclosed angel portfolio: mobile software, gaming, adtech, consumer applications, data infrastructure, and software platforms.
• AppLovin’s own positioning is highly performance-driven: “We don't sell the belief that something worked. We sell the actual fact that something worked, and we can measure everything.”
• He appears to favor product-led and technically differentiated companies. In AppLovin’s early history, he emphasized engineering, data science, DevOps, algorithms, and measurable performance over sales-heavy growth.
• Public investor profiles list seed as his primary stage; Signal also lists some later or corporate rounds.
• No reliable public check-size range was found.