Foroughi was born in Iran in 1980, a year after the Iranian Revolution, and his family moved to the United States while he was a child. He grew up in Laguna Niguel, California, attended Aliso Niguel High School and earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. After Berkeley he worked as a derivatives trader and then founded two marketing companies.
Foroughi co-founded AppLovin with John Krystynak and Andrew Karam, and ran it for years without outside funding. KKR became its biggest backer with a $400 million investment in 2018. AppLovin, based in Palo Alto, went public on April 15, 2021, at a valuation of about $24 billion. Foroughi owns around 11% of its shares.
AppLovin sells advertising placed by its AI models, and investors have watched Foroughi's statements about those models closely. He called one model update “quite substantial,” then described the pace of improvement in the second quarter as “lighter than normal,” and he has told analysts the hardest part of the system is still making the ad. After the stock fell 55%, shareholders sued, testing whether the AI improved on the schedule he described. AppLovin reports again on November 4, 2026.
Sources · written 16 October 2026
