Sales & marketing

PlayAbly

Website
Founded 2022Origin source ↗Checked 2026-09-15

Overview

PlayAbly turns ignored touchpoints into mini-games that capture attention, drive action, and generate real-time first-party data—across eCommerce, B2B funnels, restaurants, and in-store retail. As attention spans shrink to six seconds, brands can't afford lifeless popups, forms, or landing pages. We replace them with gamified conversion layers—quizzes, swipe games, stackers—that perform like performance marketing.

At Unity, our founding team helped personalize gameplay and ads for over 2 billion users. Now, we're bringing that behavioral insight to brand engagement, building a no-code platform where anyone can launch PlayAbly experiences in minutes. Think: instead of a "Spin to Win," a match-3 game that sells your product, segments your audience, and gets 4× the opt-ins.

Why now? Retargeting costs are up. Email/SMS open rates are down. And today’s customers are conditioned by the dopamine loops of TikTok and mobile games. Generic funnels can’t compete—but interactive ones can.

PlayAbly is already driving results:

Classkick (B2B): 5× ROI, 3× higher email open rates

Skout Snacks (DTC): 7× ROI, 20% higher AOV, 4× opt-in rates

89% of previously lost sessions re-engaged through PlayAbly games

We monetize on a usage + performance model, enabling fast adoption and deep long-term value. We're building a new category: AI-powered gamification that converts attention into intent, on any surface where customers meet brands.

https://www.playably.ai

Company description As recorded 2026-11-08
LinkedIn
Sales & marketingWorkflow automationBusinessesSubscription

Founders & team

Previously Baotris

Company history As recorded 2026-11-08

John Cheng

Founder

John Cheng is the Founder and CEO of PlayAbly, a gamification platform transforming how brands engage and build loyalty with their customers. With a strong foundation in gaming, John co-founded Playnomics, an AI-driven platform designed to predict player behavior. Following its acquisition by Unity Technologies, John joined Unity's executive team to lead Unity Analytics, providing data and machine learning solutions to over 20,000 game developers and reaching more than a billion players

LinkedIn
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15
5team members reported
Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-15

Founded 2022 · Source

Origins

We started PlayAbly because we saw the problem from the inside.John and Angelo met while working at **Unity Technologies**, where we helped scale ads and gameplay personalization to billions of users across mobile games. We saw firsthand how **interactive experiences and behavioral data could drive attention, trust, and action**—all in under six seconds.But outside of games? That magic was missing. We watched friends in **eCommerce and B2B** spend heavily on ads, only to lose users to static websites, generic forms, and boring popups. Every marketing funnel looked the same—and underperformed.We asked: _What if we brought the mechanics of play to commerce, sales, and brand storytelling?_So we built PlayAbly: a gamified engagement layer that turns any passive touchpoint—landing page, QR code, email popup—into a fun, branded, data-rich experience. We didn’t just want to optimize clickthroughs; we wanted to **make customer interaction feel like something people actually wanted to do**.We chose to be founders because we couldn’t unsee the gap—and we knew we had the technical and behavioral playbook to fill it.

Founder account As recorded 2026-09-15

News & product activity

Sources & observations

Y Combinator

Profile depthenriched profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedRemote
Pricing evidenceNo pricing page confirmed
Maturity: Not assessed · 3 of 6 areas documented

Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules

The source reports an inactive or acquired company; current product identity needs review.

Maturity is an evidence-based assessment, not a success rating. It may understate the current stage where evidence is limited. Coverage records documented areas, not a complete or independently audited company history.

Stage definitions
independent websitesource corroborationreachable websitedescriptive evidenceclassified market and modelsourced peoplesourced founding yearrecent publishing observed
startup.observe Directory coverage · Sources & method