Who Owns Azerion?

Azerion was founded in Amsterdam in 2014 by Aytekin and Akpinar, who had built and acquired a series of Dutch digital businesses before starting the group. The founding thesis was consolidation: Europe's digital advertising market was fragmented across hundreds of small companies, and the founders believed a scaled, integrated player could challenge the US platforms.

The first phase was pure acquisition. The group absorbed Improve Digital for programmatic infrastructure, Widespace for mobile advertising, Strossle for content recommendation, and a rolling set of publishers, game distributors, and content properties that built reach and inventory. By the early 2020s it had assembled a meaningful European footprint entirely through M&A.

In 2021 the group bought Sulake, acquiring Habbo and Hotel Hideaway and adding owned virtual worlds to the portfolio. Azerion listed on Euronext Amsterdam in February 2022 via a merger with the SPAC European Fintech IP Company, one of the few European ad tech firms to reach a public listing. Post-listing it kept acquiring, adding the game-key retailer Genba Digital and social marketing assets.

The 2025 sale of Whow Games to DoubleUGames for 65 million euros marked a simplification, exiting most of the Premium Games segment to concentrate on the advertising platform and AAA game distribution. That year the brand represented 540.6 million euros of continuing revenue, up 9 percent, with more than 550 million monthly users reached and over 13 billion ads sold per month.