AppLovin's Rafael Vivas on the $180B mobile ad empire: ecommerce hits $1B run rate in year one, now expanding self-serve

AppLovin's ecommerce push

AppLovin is a $180 billion mobile ad platform that couldn't raise money on Sand Hill Road — CEO Adam Foroughi was reportedly willing to give away 25% of the company at a $5 billion valuation. Rafael Vivas, General Manager of New Initiatives, says the business grew 70% last year and is now moving aggressively into ecommerce.

The ecommerce numbers are striking. AppLovin hit a $1 billion annualized run rate within its first year of opening the channel to ecommerce advertisers. It now has a few thousand ecommerce accounts onboard and over $12 billion in total ad spend growing at 70% year over year. For context, Facebook has over 10 million active advertisers. Vivas puts AppLovin's current market penetration at less than 0.01%, which is either a humbling admission or the clearest bull case in the room depending on your vantage point.

Self-serve is opening next week. Until now, ecommerce access has been referral-only. The onboarding vision Vivas describes is fully automated: set up a pixel, launch a campaign with one button, and the system generates creatives, pulls product links, and optimizes toward a stated goal. Generative video is in beta and expected to roll out to all advertisers by end of year.

“In '25, we announced doing having a billion dollar run rate in the ecom business. Was just a year of it being open... we have north of $12,000,000,000 of ad spend compounding at 70% year over year... I think Facebook's got over 10,000,000 active advertisers. We only have a few thousand. Right? And so for us, this is like a holy crap once in an opportunity.”

Ad format mechanics

The interactive ad unit is central to AppLovin's retention story. The format runs a video, then an interactive layer, then a product catalog — and most of the clicks happen in the interactive. For games, that means a playable demo. For ecommerce, it means gamified product exploration inside a game environment. Vivas says 80% of top advertisers use interactives, and generative interactive creation is already live. Generative video is the next unlock.

Retention holds up. Vivas says over half of advertisers who come on platform stay, which he attributes to the performance model — advertisers only scale spend when the algorithm is working, and when it does, the upside is nonlinear. Find a winning creative and you don't spend 5% more, you double the budget.

AI and internal operations

On the ad algorithm side, AppLovin's developers ship improvements weekly, increasingly drawing on state-of-the-art models. Internally, the marketing team of eight people has gone fully agentic — everyone uses Claude and Codex, building their own tools without routing requests through engineers. The IT department has apparently noticed the token spend.

Focus over expansion

Asked about expanding into connected TV or other platforms, Vivas declines. AppLovin recently shed its gaming studios to sharpen focus, and the logic applies to distribution too. With less than a tenth of a percent of the world's advertisers using the platform, the near-term mandate is reaching millions of ecommerce merchants, not chasing new inventory channels.

The company is also reverting to the AppLovin name, dropping the Axon branding it had been testing for the ad platform.