Voodoo

Voodoo built a machine that ships a mobile game almost every week, tests it against real retention data, and kills the losers fast. That machine made it the world's biggest hypercasual publisher and, on its own count, one of the three largest mobile publishers anywhere behind Google and Meta, with 8 billion downloads and 150 million people playing every month.

Founded in Paris in 2013 by Alexandre Yazdi and Laurent Ritter, the company hit a rough patch when privacy rules gutted the ad economics that hypercasual depended on. Its answer was to move up-market into hybrid-casual games and to buy its way into consumer apps, most visibly the €500 million acquisition of Gen Z darling BeReal in 2024. Revenue reached $780 million in 2025, and the harder question now is whether a firm famous for disposable hits can own products people actually keep.

Voodoo does two things that feed each other. It develops and publishes mobile games, both from its own studios and from a network of thousands of outside creators, and it runs the apps and ad infrastructure that turn all that playtime into money.

The creative side is a funnel: prototype fast, measure playtime and retention, and pour marketing behind whatever the numbers say works. The business side is an in-house growth and ad-tech stack, including a proprietary ad network and a real-time bidding platform, that squeezes revenue out of Voodoo's own first-party data. Games like Mob Control and Block Jam 3D sit on one end; BeReal, Wizz, and the Blitz real-money gaming app sit on the other.

A single mobile hit is a lottery ticket. Voodoo's whole reason to exist is to make the odds boring: run enough cheap prototypes through a data-driven publishing pipeline that the winners show up on schedule instead of by luck. For the thousands of small studios it works with, it solves the other half of the problem, distribution and monetization, the parts a two-person team in Ukraine or Turkey cannot build alone.

The deeper problem it is now attacking is durability. Hypercasual revenue is fragile and got hit hard by ad-tracking changes, so the pivot into hybrid-casual games and sticky consumer apps is really an attempt to trade a stream of quick spikes for revenue that lasts.

Voodoo serves three crowds at once. The obvious one is the everyday mobile player: a broad, global audience described in the company's own ad materials as roughly half men and half women, mostly aged 18 to 54, who spend about twelve minutes a day playing.

The other two are commercial. Independent and aspiring game studios come to Voodoo for a publishing partner that handles user acquisition, monetization, and product coaching, sometimes through its free Voodoo Academy program with cash rewards attached. Brands and advertisers, including what Voodoo says are 100+ Fortune 500 US companies, buy access to that huge, engaged, family-safe gaming audience.

Voodoo's catalog spans throwaway fun and genuine habit. On the games side, hybrid-casual titles like Mob Control and Block Jam 3D each grossed close to $100 million, and older hypercasual hits like Paper.io and Helix Jump drove much of the early download avalanche.

The apps side is the newer bet. BeReal, the once-a-day authentic photo app, brought a Gen Z social network with tens of millions of users; Wizz is a chat app for young people with millions of monthly users in the US and UK; and Blitz turns casual games into cash tournaments. Underneath it all sits a publishing platform and SDK that outside studios plug into for analytics, A/B testing, and ad monetization.

Voodoo makes money the way most of mobile does, just at enormous scale. Its games are free to download and earn through in-app advertising and in-app purchases, with a growing chunk coming from its own ad network selling that inventory directly to brands rather than through open exchanges.

The portfolio adds two newer revenue shapes on top: consumer apps like BeReal that are building their own advertising businesses, and Blitz, which takes a cut of real-money gaming tournaments. There is no published price sheet for advertisers, brand deals are sold as managed campaigns and programmatic deals through a sales team.

Voodoo competes on two fronts. In hypercasual and casual publishing it goes up against the likes of AppLovin, Supercell, Playrix, and Rovio; on the consumer-app and social side, BeReal and Wizz land it in the same conversation as the big social platforms it likes to define itself against.

Its edge is the machine, not any one game: a decade of prototype-test-scale muscle memory, a proprietary ad and growth stack fed by first-party data, and a partner network of thousands of studios. The strategic bet now is diversification, moving weight from fragile hypercasual spikes toward hybrid-casual games, sticky apps, and real-money gaming.

Voodoo's case is mostly a case about scale. It reports 8 billion downloads, 150 million monthly active users, and $780 million in 2025 revenue, and it published record 2024 results of €623 million revenue, up nearly 20%, with €135 million in EBITDA.

The growth engine is just as loud: the marketing team says it produces 25,000 creatives and serves 250 billion ad impressions a year. On the studio side, Voodoo Academy points to solo developers turning single prototypes into 10-million-download hits, evidence the publishing playbook can travel.

The recurring praise for Voodoo is about reach and craft: it is genuinely good at building, marketing, and scaling mobile products, and its Paris office even won a best-office award in France. Job seekers point to a fast, learning-fast culture where small teams can ship things billions of people touch.

The recurring criticism is the flip side of the same coin. Voodoo is often knocked for favoring quantity and monetization over depth, and the pace is described as demanding with uneven work-life balance. The pivot to hybrid-casual and BeReal is partly an answer to the first complaint.

Voodoo has never been short of institutional money. Goldman Sachs put in $200 million back in 2018, Tencent took a minority stake in 2020, and in 2021 Groupe Bruxelles Lambert bought about 16% for €266 million, a deal that valued the company near €1.7 billion.

Reported total funding sits above $800 million, and third-party trackers have pegged the valuation in the $2 billion range. Rather than raise fresh equity for its 2024 shopping spree, Voodoo funded the BeReal deal and refinanced through debt, securing €175 million-plus from a banking consortium in April 2025.

Voodoo runs lean and fast for its scale: around 800 employees spread across Paris headquarters and offices in cities like Istanbul, Barcelona, Helsinki, Tokyo, Seoul, and Los Angeles. The culture it advertises is built for velocity, with values that prize speed, risk-taking, direct feedback, ownership, and a running fight against bureaucracy.

That shows up in hiring, where the goal is a decision inside 30 days through a recruiter chat, a case study, a Q&A, and a final round with senior leadership. Perks skew generous and Paris-centric, from fully covered healthcare and gym memberships to unlimited vacation and remote days, with relocation support for people moving to France.

The company behind the brand is Voodoo SAS, a French société par actions simplifiée registered at 12 place Dauphine in central Paris and listed on the Paris Trade and Companies Register under number 792 483 307. Its data practices lean deliberately light: Voodoo says it usually does not collect data that directly identifies players, working mostly from advertising IDs, device data, and gameplay signals.

Because it is EU-headquartered and consumer-facing, GDPR shapes how it handles consent, advertising, and the partner studios and ad networks it shares data with. Its apps are not intended for anyone under 16.