Wildfire has launched its Spark platform for brand engagement on top of the gamer-focused Discord communications platform.
It has also raised funding from LFG Holdings, a holding company founded by serial entrepreneurs Dylan Collins and Max Bleyleben. The company will use the funds to accelerate its product development and sales team.
Spark is a kind of efficiency driver for community-focused ad campaigns, like having a managed service platform to make better decisions on communities and having data at the core of it. It can be better than an agency in that respect, said Logan Jory, CEO of Wildfire, in an interview with GamesBeat. Spark can run campaigns that can affect wishlists for games, which is something everyone agrees are pretty important these days.
“It benefits the long-term brand equity of these companies and these games that are coming out,” Jory said. “One core part of Spark is making everyone’s lives easier by enabling better community decisions.”
Spark has a Scout AI tool that takes into account past community performance, contextual data, and surveys that have run inside the communities. That makes it easier to match a brand with the characteristics of a particular game community.
“It kind of decouples our institutional knowledge in the company about communities, and actually makes this scalable solution to select the right communities and the right kind of campaign,” Jory said.
Discord is one of the world’s most popular messaging platforms for gamers, with over 200 million monthly active users. It’s also under the microscope now as the company is expected to file for an IPO in 2026. The company has been rapidly growing in prominence amongst brands eager to reach its Gen Z audience.
Origins
Wildfire was founded in 2022 by Jory to help consumer brands, movie and game
studios and their agencies build engaging experiences within Discord. The company works
with over 50 brands and agencies to build bespoke engagements in Discord servers and
communities. The company’s approach blends creativity, data, and technology to transform brand engagement into conversational, immersive fan experiences.
Jory, who had a background in advertising, said the focus on Discord came from his own personal time spent on the communications platform. In the midst of the pandemic, he was drawn to it as a platform for forums, messenger chat, social sharing and more.
“When you have a community that’s buzzing about something, I think it’s just the most engagement and fun you can have on the internet,” Jory said. “I got involved in managing communities for different kinds of projects and learned that side of it.”
Jory decided to use his knowledge of Discord, which is heavily used by gamers, and his knowledge of advertising together.
“There’s not many places left online without any ads, and Discord is just a huge one,” Jory said.
Then Discord released its Quests platform in 2024. It was a platform for rewarded, opt-in mini activities inside discord. These Quests are akin to ads, but they’re designed in a way to connect players with games in a way that feels native to Discord.
“We were running brand partnerships for about 18 months before Quests was released,” Jory said. “Then Quests was released, and they created two complimentary strategies on Discord.”
He added, “The best way of thinking of us is this. If you have quests as the platform solution for ads, we are the creator solution for ads on Discord.”
“Wildfire is leading the way in how developers and publishers can connect with players on Discord,” said Nikki DePaola, VP of Global Media at Liquid Advertising, in a statement. “Their solution is part of a wider trend we’re seeing in gaming, where users want to feel more genuine connection with games, and want to feel rewarded for their participation. With Wildfire, we can connect with gamers in bespoke ways, all while making their communities feel supported.”
She added, “Solutions from Wildfire and solutions from Discord are both valuable, as engaging with audiences in a variety of ways is important to increasing touchpoints with the brand, which in turn leads to increased awareness and other positive impacts on KPIs”.
Expansion efforts
As Wildfire accelerates its expansion, the company has made two senior commercial hires,
adding proven operators with deep roots in gaming: Aimee Baller has been appointed SVP
of Sales, alongside Nohely Garay as Senior Director of Client Partnerships & Strategy, who
both join from senior roles at SuperAwesome and Overwolf.
“This is an exciting chapter for Wildfire: Dylan and the LFG Holdings team deeply understand not just Discord and online culture but specifically how advertising plays a part within it. With their support, we’ll accelerate our vision of becoming the de facto activation layer for both endemic and non-endemic brands in community spaces,” said Logan Jory, CEO of Wildfire, in a statement. “We’re delighted to be backing Logan and his team at Wildfire.
“The Discord ecosystem is an incredible part of youth culture and having more responsible ways for brands to meaningfully engage with communities there is an essential part of its evolution,” said Dylan Collins, LFG Holdings, in a statement.
Alongside the investment, Wildfire has unveiled Spark: its proprietary platform designed to power paid activations and insights across Discord communities at scale.
At the core of the platform is Scout, an AI-enabled audience planner that helps the company identify relevant Discord communities based on audience signals, historical campaign performance, and contextual fit. Buyers can track live campaigns, view performance dashboards, and manage community content approvals within the platform.
For community owners, Spark provides tooling to understand their member base and manage brand partnerships without compromising authenticity, including participation
insights, workflow automation, and campaign reporting.
“Spark is the culmination of everything we’ve learned from thousands of community placements on Discord,” said Jory. “It not only gives community owners better tools to run their day-to-day, but also puts efficiency and scalability right at the forefront of our operations and gives rise to better decision making, making community media a genuine, measurable channel for brands.”
The funding round
Jory raised funding from a meeting of the minds with Dylan Collins, former CEO of SuperAwesome, which was acquired by Epic Games. Collins is the cofounder of LFG Holdings and he has been interested in social gaming platforms and user-generated content for a long time.
Jory said Collins has proven very valuable as an investor and adviser for the company, and the knowledge of the power of Discord is rapidly rising as the company nears its reported IPO.
“It’s a really interesting time for us,” Jory said. “We are looking top down on high demand. We don’t have to have as many conversations now on what Discord is and how it works.”
The conversations now are more about Wildfire’s our mechanics and how brands can be integrated into authentic community conversations, Jory said.
Wildfire’s unique approach on Discord
Wildfire has relationships with the communities on Discord, and it can put those communities together with Fortune 50 brands that Jory knows. Wildfire can run a campaign that marries the brands and communities. If the campaigns are relevant to users, then the communities can opt in to run them in front of their users.
“They are the ones creating and publishing the content. The brands leverage the editorial authority of that person who is running the community, who might be doing the announcements, running the events and organizing giveaways. Those are the people who have the trust in those communities. So the theory works in the same way as in influence marketing, in that you are buying into owning that conversation for some period, two to three weeks,” Jory said.
The brands can offer giveaways for wishlisting, signing up or joining servers. Wildfire can generate user-generated content competitions, like conversations about user preferences in polls or sharing the best images in a competition.
“It works so well because you’re in a chat environment and you’re in an environment where people want to share, engage, around gameplay footage. It works super well. And it’s an ad. Our brand is sponsoring and supporting the community.”
Players can share the game footage with their friends and get a reward for doing that. And it works.
“We’ve got some fantastic benchmarks around lift, across different kind of KPIs,” said Jory. “If there’s an update in two months, then we can go back into the community and do it again.”
That helps the game companies with retention of players and the brands are happy that a lot of players are interacting with the branding content.
All of this is getting done with a small team of 11 people, said Jory, who is based in London. The team itself is virtual. The amount of the funding round isn’t disclosed, but it is the first outside money in the company.
“We were fully bootstrapped,” he said. “Spark has been built out of the profits. It’s a sustainable business in that sense.”
As for Wildfire’s finest moments, Jory said his company started running a World of Warcraft campaign this week, and it’s a “format that works particularly well on Discord,”he said. It’s a personality quiz for a new housing update in World of Warcraft. You can take the quiz, find out your aesthetic for a home, and players can learn about housing in the game. The player winds up with a custom banner and an avatar.
“It’s extremely visible but also it plays into this identity marketing. Discord is all about avatars and identity,” Jory said. “This can work with any kind of IP.”
Jory said he is excited when a brand and game community are in sync. You can run ads that the communities are excited to share with their players.
“That’s why I’ve always been really careful about the kind of sponsors that we have. I love advertising generally, and I think creating this kind of work excites me,” Jory said.
Jory said it’s hard to identify direct competitors. One could be the ad sales team for all of Reddit, he said. But Jory said that he believes in Discord as a platform and it’s hard to see anyone else doing something similar. It’s a lot different than advertising on social media.
“Community is really what we sell,” he said.
As for the roadmap, Wildfire will continue to run activations and get Spark into the market, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. His company is focused on creating the infrastructure and managed service to enable brands of any kind, studios or games of any kind, to reach any audience in closed community spaces.
“Discord was the natural place to start,” he said. “We have some conversations with some other platforms, which is quite exciting, but nothing concrete at the moment.”