Armenian-American executive Andre Tutundjian helped steer Liftoff Mobile to a $3.83 billion valuation on Thursday, June 4, as the company he serves as Chief Operating Officer made its debut on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. The stock climbed more than 20 percent on its first day of trading, a rare bright spot in a year when technology offerings have struggled to find footing, reports Zartonk Media.
Liftoff priced its initial public offering at $23 per share, above its revised range, raising roughly $437 million and selling 19 million shares under the ticker LFTO. For Tutundjian, a son of the Armenian community in Los Angeles, the moment placed him among the small number of Armenian-Americans ever to stand at the helm of a company ringing the opening bell on a major US exchange.
His path to that podium runs straight through a company he built himself. He co-founded AlgoLift in 2016, an ML-based marketing optimization platform, and led it as chief executive until Vungle acquired it in 2020, the mobile advertising network that would merge with Liftoff a year later. Tutundjian rose through senior analytics and operations roles before taking the operational reins of the combined company. Earlier in his career he had held analytics leadership positions at the mobile gaming studios Scopely and Cie Games.
Tutundjian’s Armenian roots trace to Southern California. He is an alumnus of the Ari Guiragos Minassian Armenian School, the only Armenian day school in Orange County, and he currently serves as a youth basketball coach for Homenetmen Massis in Los Angeles. These are the kind of formative diaspora institutions that raise a generation before they go on to build careers of their own. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Arts in economics from Boston University.
Liftoff itself dates back to 2012 and came together with Vungle in 2021, after the investment giant Blackstone acquired Vungle and combined the two portfolio companies, with General Atlantic later joining as a minority investor. The union paired Liftoff’s user-acquisition engine with Vungle’s app-monetization network, and the two now form the backbone of Cortex, the company’s AI-powered platform. Cortex relies on machine learning to identify which users are most likely to stay engaged and spend money inside an app, then directs advertising toward them, the kind of practical, profit-generating artificial intelligence that has become central to the mobile economy. The platform reaches roughly 1.4 billion daily active users worldwide and serves hundreds of advertising customers, competing in a crowded field alongside names such as AppLovin and Unity.
Tutundjian and his wife, Ani, both come from families well ingrained in the Armenian community in Southern California. For the Armenian nation, an executive helping lead a company to a multi-billion-dollar Nasdaq debut is a milestone worth marking.
