Appcharge is riding the DTC wave to new heights.
Appcharge announced a $58 million Series B funding round in August 2025, with the goal of expanding the company’s products helping game makers operate web stores and build their direct-to-consumer revenue pipelines. Since then, the Tel Aviv based company has more than doubled its head count — currently boasting 141 employees — and has seen the annualized DTC transaction volume inside its customers’ games increase dramatically month-over-month, reaching $500 million in July 2025, $700 million in January 2026 and $1 billion as of today, March 23, 2026.
“We see the growth from both existing customers from the usual suspects like Europe and the U.S., but also increasing traction from Korea, from China and Japan,” said Appcharge co-founder and general manager Roei Barassi in an interview with GamesBeat.
Appcharge has raised a total of $89 million in funding across three rounds, reaching a valuation of $100 million during its Series A funding round in November 2024. Barassi drew a direct line between Appcharge’s Series B fundraise and the growth of its DTC transaction volume, pointing out that a significant amount of the funding went toward growing his company’s go-to-market teams across newer markets like China, Japan and Korea.
“It’s sales, business development, customer success and account management around the globe,” Barassi said. “Most of the R&D and product teams are headquartered here in Tel Aviv, so in terms of the departments that grew, we are now operating in Canada, Europe, Japan, China, Korea and Turkey.”
Although Barassi declined to share exact revenue numbers, he confirmed that there is a clear positive correlation between overall DTC transaction growth and Appcharge’s revenue — and that the $1 billion figure is “just the beginning” for the company. Barassi forecasted that Appcharge’s DTC transaction value could increase to about $10 billion within one or two years.
Appcharge’s spike in annualized DTC transaction volume shows how game makers are increasingly experimenting with new and alternative revenue streams. With user acquisition and discovery more of a challenge than ever, DTC revenue streams allow developers and publishers to maximize the value of their pre-existing players — and get their user acquisition flywheels moving faster in the process.
“Direct-to-consumer is not just, ‘okay, let’s make more revenue and take it home,’” Barassi said. “It’s just moving the wheel faster and making their user acquisition much faster, because they have more revenue that they are gaining, and they can invest it in user acquisition.”
Barassi told GamesBeat that he believes the shift toward DTC games is no longer a hypothetical experiment, but rather a foregone conclusion — and that Appcharge is looking to continue placing itself at the center of this evolution.
“For a game publisher, it’s not a question of if to go direct-to-consumer, it’s only when,” he said. “We can feel the snowball; we look at the big guys, the Supercells and the Playtikas of the world, are going very hard on direct-to-consumer, investing a lot of resources in it — and no one wants to be behind.”