Liftoff Mobile, an adtech firm focused on performance marketing and monetization solutions for the mobile app economy, has filed to go public.
The company announced that it has publicly filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relating to a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of its common stock.
The offering is subject to market and other conditions, including the effectiveness of such registration statement, and there can be no assurance as to whether or when the offering may be commenced or completed. The number of shares to be offered and the price range and other terms for the proposed offering have not yet been determined.
If the offering is completed, Liftoff intends to list its stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “LFTO.”
Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Jefferies and Morgan Stanley will act as joint lead book-running managers for the proposed offering. Barclays, RBC Capital Markets, UBS Investment Bank, Wells Fargo Securities, William Blair, Cantor, Deutsche Bank Securities, PJT Partners, Wolfe | Nomura Alliance, BTIG, Needham & Company and Raymond James will act as joint book-running managers. Blackstone Capital Markets, MUFG and LUMA Securities will act as co-managers.
The proposed offering will be made only by means of a prospectus. Liftoff describes itself as a leading growth and monetization engine built for the mobile app economy. Its AI-powered platform, Cortex, unifies marketing, creative, and monetization to deliver measurable performance at scale across the app lifecycle.
Liftoff enables advertisers to unlock profitable user growth while helping app publishers maximize revenue with advanced ad monetization technology. The company supports a diverse, global customer base across gaming, consumer, and emerging app categories.
Financial metrics
For the nine months ended September 30, Liftoff reported revenue of $491.58 million, up from $377.07 million a year earlier. The net loss for the nine months was $25.6 million, compared with a loss of $7.4 million a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA was $263.29 million for the nine months, compared with $176.19 million a year earlier. Nearly half of all revenue came from the gaming vertical.
Liftoff said in its filing that it has 1.4 billion active users, 140,000 active SDK apps, and more than 1,000 global advertisers. Those advertisers/marketers used Liftoff to acquire new users.
In the S-1 statement, Liftoff said, “The app ecosystem is massive — SensorTower estimates that during 2024 over five billion global mobile users spent an average of approximately three hours daily on apps. In this expanding market, app developers have two primary needs to grow their businesses. The first is user acquisition, which is acquiring engaged and high intent users with a lot of choices to drive growth; the other is user monetization, as in-app advertising is usually a core revenue driver for many apps.”
These needs are driving an expanding opportunity, with in-app ad spend projected to grow from $332 billion in 2025 to nearly $617 billion by 2030, according to a November 2025 study we commissioned by a third-party strategy consulting firm, Altman Solon (the “Altman Solon Report”). Within this market, the Altman Solon Report estimates the serviceable addressable market for mobile, global in-app independent ad tech platforms to be approximately $79 billion in 2025, with an estimated growth trajectory of 11% compound annual growth rate (“CAGR”) through 2030, driven by strong growth across the app economy, particularly in verticals outside of gaming.