Fourteen years ago, Andrew Paradise co-founded Skillz with a simple but ambitious belief: that competition brings out the best in everyone, and that mobile gaming deserved infrastructure worthy of that. What followed (the platform, the category, the legal battles, the pivots, the growth) became the defining work of his career. And now the company has a new name.
Skillz grew into something larger than the category it created. Along the way, an AI advertising engine was built, and the infrastructure layer developers need to ship and operate live games was acquired. At a certain point, the name of the company that started this no longer captured the full value of what it had become. FIRY (pronounced: fury) isn’t a departure from that story. It’s the natural next name for it.
Where the name comes from
In thinking through what name could hold everything this company has become, Paradise kept coming back to the imagery of a phoenix: something forged through fire, reduced, and then rising into something stronger.
FIRY comes from the Old English word for fiery, meaning to burn brightly. “That felt right,” Paradise said. “Not just as a nod to the phoenix arc of this company’s story, but as a statement of intent. We are not a company that dims. We are a company that burns brighter as pressure increases. The last fourteen years proved that.”
What FIRY has built
FIRY is a global technology portfolio operating at the intersection of competition, commerce, and data, three businesses, each strong on its own, dramatically more valuable together, built around one shared customer: the developer.
Skillz
The original business. Real-money, skill-based mobile gaming. 90M registered users across 6M+ payment accounts. The category Skillz invented in 2012, backed by 90+ patents and 110+ pending.
RZR
Our AI-powered adtech platform. 149% net revenue growth in FY25 and profitable for three consecutive quarters. Our fastest-growing business.
Beamable
Acquired in 2026. Developer tooling for game studios, providing the backend and LiveOps infrastructure that completes FIRY’s full-stack offering.
FIRY is the holding company that operates all three in a reinforcing way. Each one stands on its own. Together, they form something far more durable than any of them alone.
A new name for a new chapter
FIRY is more than a rebrand. It reflects a real evolution in how the company operates, how it thinks, and what it is building. Today, FIRY operates a world-class AI adtech platform, has acquired developer infrastructure that expands its addressable market well beyond real-money gaming, and is building what Paradise believes is the most complete data-driven system in mobile, connecting acquisition, engagement, monetization, and measurement inside one closed-loop architecture.
When you’re operating all of that under a single brand that signals one thing to the market, you create a gap between perception and reality. FIRY closes that gap.
What comes next
FIRY is a declaration about what this company is oriented toward at its core: building scalable systems at the intersection of competition, commerce, and data. Systems that push the boundaries of what’s possible and turn the unimaginable into lasting value for developers, advertisers, and the consumers they serve.
FIRY is the name of what the company has become. And more importantly, it’s the name of where it’s going.