We spent a decade making play pay.
Then we pointed it at retail. Playably underwrites 100% cashback against real-world events — a team wins the World Cup, it snows on Christmas Day, the title game goes to overtime. Shoppers pay full price, the brand keeps its margin, and we carry the risk.
The mechanics come from games. The underwriting comes from sports finance. The reason it works at all comes from a lesson learned at Unity.
“You don’t take data. You earn it.”
Angelo Ferro
Founder & CEOA lesson from a billion players.
Angelo was an early pre-IPO hire at Unity Technologies, where he built and scaled the analytics and ad-monetization platform behind some of the most successful gamification products ever shipped — past a billion monthly active users. He later co-founded Baotris in the YC S19 batch.
What that decade taught him was not how to extract attention. It was the opposite: the only durable data is the data you are given. Players hand over everything when the experience is worth it, and nothing when it isn’t — no matter how clever the prompt.
Six years building engagement and conversion tools for e-commerce brands turned that lesson into Playably. Because we sit on the transaction, we learn who bought, what they bought, and the event that moved them — and we earn that opt-in by making the brand and the shopper measurably better off. That is the moat.
Unity scale. Game-design craft. Sports-finance rigor.
Playably needed three skill sets that rarely sit in one room: people who have monetized play at enormous scale, people who can design a mechanic worth playing, and people who have priced risk on live sporting events. This is where the team learned each of them.
The people who build the campaigns.
Finance, gaming and e-commerce — small enough that the person who designs your mechanic is the person who runs it.
Angelo Ferro
Early pre-IPO Unity hire who scaled Unity Ads & Analytics past 1B monthly active users. Co-founded Baotris (YC S19).
Seema Rao
Two decades of game design, plus a past life as a deputy museum director. Owns the mechanics that make a campaign worth playing.
Kajal Ford
Previously ran operations at Unity, Intercom and Baotris. Keeps every campaign legal, funded and on schedule.
John Cheng
Founded Playnomics, the game-analytics startup Unity acquired and rebuilt into Unity Analytics. Later GM of Unity Data Products, and co-founder and CEO of Baotris.
Alvin Lobo
Three-time sports-media CFO — Overtime, Skillz and theScore. Pressure-tests the underwriting model that lets brands carry zero payout risk.
Ray Wang
Founding team at Baotris, with product roles at Unity, Google, TikTok and Attentive.
Pay full price. Win it all back.
One campaign, tied to a real-world moment your shoppers already care about. They pay full price for a shot at 100% cashback; you keep your margin either way, because Playably prices the outcome, hedges it, and carries the payout risk. Compliance, the free-entry path and the hedge are all ours.
See how a rebate worksDon’t just take our word for it.
Brands that replaced discounts with Playably report higher AOV, stronger retention, and $0 of margin given up.
“Turning off discounting actually increased my sales. A total win-win.”
It was the perfect Christmas game, and I look forward to running it again next year. Sales jumped 23% on launch, participant AOV rose 40%, and we never touched our price.
“Our best Meta campaign in a month, and it wasn't even a sale.”
March Madness overtime cashback: 18.25× Meta ROAS, promo AOV up 67%, and store sales up 57% versus the prior week. Nobody shares a coupon, but everyone shares a shot at a free dash cam.
“The conversion results speak for themselves. Can't wait to do more together.”
A playful health quiz that matches each visitor to the right remedy tripled conversion versus the old flat quiz and lifted add-to-cart 36% across the catalog.
Ready to replace discounts with delight?
30+ Shopify brands launched. 100% retention. Your campaign next.
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