Azerion is a Dutch-Turkish venture capital company that sells and publishes digital advertising in online and mobile video games. The company was founded in 2014 by Atilla Aytekin and Umut Akpinar.[2]
Aytekin and Akpinar met at the Turkish student association at TU Delft. In 2004, they founded Triodor Software and Orange Games later the same year before renaming it Azerion.[3] Initially, Azerion focused their efforts on casual gaming development. In 2018, the company added monetization and ad sales to their platforms.
Azerion became a publicly traded company listed on Euronext Amsterdam in February 2022 following a merger with EFIC1, an already publicly traded Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) .[4] Almost immediately, the value of its shares declined.[5][6] Since this merger, it has dropped from a high of €10,00 to €7,50 as of July 2022, a decline of 25%.[7] Co-founder Atilla Aytekin made an insider purchase of €5 million of the company’s stock in quarter 2 of 2022.[8]
Azerion currently claims to serve more than 500 million unique monthly active users and 400.000 advertisers and has in its portfolio more than 19.000 game titles across 4.800 game portals.[9] Azerion announced its support for the Ukrainian war effort against Russia in March 2022 and made donations to Ukraine 555, an aid campaign based in the Netherlands.[10]