Papaya Gaming built Solitaire Cash into a global hit, then lost $719 million to Skillz over undisclosed bots. Meet the founders and the business model.
Tel Aviv, Israel · Mobile skill-based gaming · Maker of Solitaire Cash, Bingo Cash, Bubble Cash and 21 Cash · Founded 2016 to 2019, depending on the source
Papaya Gaming turned solitaire, bingo and bubble-shooter apps into real-money tournaments that ran more than 2.6 billion matches between 2021 and 2024, and in 2026 that model cost the company the largest false-advertising judgment in U.S. history: $719 million awarded to rival Skillz over undisclosed bots, according to Judge Denise Cote's July 2026 ruling.
Company Snapshot
| Legal name | Papaya Gaming Ltd. |
| HQ | Tel Aviv, Israel, with additional operations in Poland and a U.S. presence in Delaware |
| Founded | Sources differ: 2016 or 2017 (Crunchbase; The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 3, 2026) versus 2019 (Tracxn; NeonRiver) |
| CEO and co-founder | Oriel Bachar |
| Co-founders | Andrey Birman (CTO), Alex Liakhovetsky (VP R&D), Yonatan "Yoni" Zvik (VP Product) |
| Flagship apps | Solitaire Cash, Bingo Cash, Bubble Cash, 21 Cash |
| Downloads | More than 37 million lifetime downloads (company figures cited by Legal Sports Report, Oct. 2024) |
| Employees | Approximately 400 before a 30-person layoff in late July 2026 (CTech, July 2026) |
| Gross margin | Above 90% in recent years, per the company's own court filings (Globes, Aug. 25, 2026) |
| Known for | Real-money, skill-based mobile tournaments, an ESPN ambassador deal with Stephen A. Smith, and a $719 million false advertising judgment |
What Does Papaya Gaming Do?
Papaya Gaming takes familiar single-player casual games, solitaire, bingo and bubble-shooter formats, and converts them into head-to-head or multiplayer tournaments where players pay an entry fee for a chance to win real cash. The company describes itself as a pioneer of the "skill-based tournament" category, arguing that outcomes turn on player ability rather than chance, which is the legal distinction that separates its apps from traditional gambling in most U.S. states. Its four core titles, Solitaire Cash, Bingo Cash, Bubble Cash and 21 Cash, ran more than 2.6 billion tournaments between 2021 and 2024 alone, according to figures Judge Denise Cote cited in her July 2026 opinion in Skillz Platform Inc. v. Papaya Gaming Ltd., as reported by Casino.org's coverage of the ruling.
The Founding
Papaya Gaming was founded in Tel Aviv by a small team of Israeli developers who set out to apply esports-style competition to casual mobile games. Crunchbase and an August 3, 2026 report from The Jerusalem Post place the founding in 2016 or 2017, while other trackers, including Tracxn and a February 2026 NeonRiver profile of CEO Oriel Bachar, date it to 2019. Company materials describe an early focus on matchmaking speed: where waiting for a live human opponent on a rival platform could take minutes, Papaya's system could seat a player in a tournament almost instantly, according to a summary of trial testimony reported by Shattered.io's case timeline. That speed, and the mechanism behind it, later became the center of Papaya's legal troubles.
Who Founded and Runs Papaya Gaming?
Papaya Gaming has four named co-founders who still lead the company's core functions.
Oriel Bachar, CEO and Co-Founder
Oriel Bachar has served as Papaya's chief executive since the company's founding and holds a BBA from Reichman University (IDC Herzliya), according to a NeonRiver executive profile published in February 2026. Before Papaya, he held senior roles in Israel's technology sector focused on product strategy and user engagement, the same profile states. Under his leadership the company expanded into Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States and grew past 480 employees at its peak, per NeonRiver, before the 2026 restructuring reduced headcount toward the 400 mark. Bachar has also spoken publicly about high-tech's social responsibilities, a theme referenced in CTech's coverage of the company's 2026 layoffs.
Andrey Birman, Co-Founder and CTO
Andrey Birman co-founded Papaya Gaming and serves as its chief technology officer, reporting to Bachar, according to The Org's organizational chart for the company. Birman's prior work history includes the storage company Ionir, the Government of Israel and PrecyseTech, per a CB Insights executive listing. As CTO, Birman has owned the matchmaking and gameplay infrastructure that let Papaya seat tens of millions of tournament entries daily, the same systems that Judge Denise Cote's July 2026 opinion found included undisclosed "liquidity bots" and "tailored bots."
Alex Liakhovetsky, Co-Founder and VP of Research and Development
Alex Liakhovetsky co-founded the company and leads research and development, a title he has held since Papaya's earliest funding rounds, according to Crunchbase's company profile. Data platform Tracxn and contact database VisualVisitor both list him as a continuing R&D co-founder as of 2026.
Yonatan "Yoni" Zvik, Co-Founder and VP of Product
Yonatan Zvik, known internally as Yoni, co-founded Papaya and leads its product organization, according to company listings on Crunchbase and VisualVisitor. Product decisions under Zvik's remit, including how games were marketed as fair, skill-based competition, became a central issue at trial in the Skillz litigation.
The Rest of the Leadership Team
Below the four founders, Papaya's leadership includes chief financial officer Ornit Gimelstein, VP of human resources Lilach Romano, and general counsel Ifat Steinman, according to a company org chart published by The Org. VP of marketing Uri Pearl and global CX director Mika Palevsky round out the senior team The Org lists as of 2026, alongside a business analytics group that grew large enough to include dedicated team leads for analytics, product and payments by the time the Skillz litigation reached trial.
Papaya Gaming and Skillz: A Rivalry That Predates the Lawsuit
Skillz founder and CEO Andrew Paradise has described Papaya as a company that copied his platform's format and then undercut it commercially. Skillz, founded in Boston in 2012 by Paradise and Casey Chafkin, pioneered the idea of letting outside game developers add real-money, skill-based tournaments to their titles and went public in 2020 as the first publicly traded mobile esports platform, according to Skillz's own corporate history. Paradise told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that once Papaya and other rivals entered the category, "they were kicking our butts," making five times as much money in a product's first week and pushing up advertising costs across the category.
The turning point, Paradise said, came at the 2023 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where Skillz chief strategy officer Casey Chafkin learned that competitors were matching players against bots rather than other humans. Skillz had already tested that theory once before: it won a $43 million patent-infringement judgment against a different rival, AviaGames, in February 2024, before turning its legal focus to Papaya.
Papaya pushed back hard once the Skillz suit was filed in March 2024. The company countersued, invoking the "unclean hands" doctrine, which bars a plaintiff from recovering damages for conduct it engaged in itself, and argued Skillz had run its own deceptive campaign against Papaya, according to a case summary from PokerScout. Judge Cote rejected that defense in a November 21, 2025 opinion, finding the two companies' conduct was not comparable.
Skillz has framed the entire dispute as existential for the category it created. "The concept that Papaya built, it's built on fraud, it's built on stealing from people and tricking them," Paradise told the Review-Journal after the April 2026 verdict. "It's destroying the industry I started."
How Did Papaya Gaming Grow and Raise Money?
Papaya Gaming's funding history is unusually thin for a company of its scale. Data provider CB Insights lists roughly $4.7 million raised across six seed rounds between 2019 and 2021, with investors including PROOF, NFX, Secret Chord Ventures and Homeward Ventures. PitchBook separately lists Meta3Ventures, Drive by DraftKings, Rainfall Ventures and SVB among its backers, without disclosing a valuation.
That modest funding total stands in contrast to the company's later scale: more than 37 million lifetime app downloads and, according to visitor-intelligence firm VisualVisitor, revenue in the $10 million to $50 million range as tracked before its most recent growth phase. Papaya's own July 2026 court filings, cited by Globes, describe gross margins that have remained above 90% in recent years, a figure consistent with a company that grew largely on its own cash flow rather than venture capital.
Papaya Gaming should not be confused with Papaya Global, an unrelated Israeli-founded payroll and workforce-management company led by CEO Eynat Guez that has raised more than $444 million and reached a $3.7 billion valuation, according to the company's own funding announcements. The two "Papaya" companies share a home country and a name but operate in entirely different industries.
The ESPN and Stephen A. Smith Campaign
Papaya's highest-profile marketing moment arrived in November 2025, when ESPN's Stephen A. Smith became the company's global ambassador for its first World Solitaire Championship, days after a New York judge had already found it "undisputed that Papaya used tailored bots to control the outcomes of tournaments," according to an October 27, 2025 opinion reported by Outkick. Smith had gone viral months earlier for playing Solitaire Cash on air during the 2025 NBA Finals, and Papaya turned the moment into an AI-generated ad campaign featuring Smith alongside ESPN colleagues Dan Orlovsky, Mina Kimes, Laura Rutledge, Kendrick Perkins and Ros Gold-Onwude. The campaign centered on the World Solitaire Championship itself, a tournament Papaya said would fly roughly 400 competitors to Miami in February 2026 to play for a prize pool of about $300,000, according to a report from Defector. Papaya framed the event as the sport's first world championship; critics framed the timing, coming days after Papaya lost a key summary-judgment ruling, as an attempt to convert legal exposure into a marketing moment.
Front Office Sports reported that ESPN subsequently directed several of those personalities, though not Smith, to stop promoting the app; Kimes, Orlovsky and Rutledge deleted their posts, according to Awful Announcing. Smith addressed the controversy on his own podcast, saying his team was "evaluating the accuracy and merits of the claims" against Papaya, per Barrett Media. By December 2025, Sports Illustrated reported that Smith had quietly parted ways with the sponsorship roughly a month after it began.
The Skillz Lawsuit: Bots, Trial and a $719 Million Judgment
Skillz Platform Inc. sued Papaya Gaming in March 2024 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that Papaya advertised its games as fair, skill-based, peer-to-peer competitions while secretly filling tournaments with computer bots. Judge Denise Cote's rulings, summarized by Regulatory Oversight, describe two categories of bots: "liquidity bots" that filled empty tournament slots so games could start faster, and "tailored bots" that produced a predetermined outcome resembling a house-banked game rather than genuine peer competition. According to Cote's opinion as reported by Casino.org, tailored bots operated in more than 630 million Papaya tournaments, roughly one-quarter of the 2.6 billion tournaments the company ran between 2021 and 2024, and some 20-player tournaments included only one human competitor against 19 bots.
An eight-person jury heard the case from April 13 to April 23, 2026, and returned a verdict finding Papaya liable under the Lanham Act and New York General Business Law, awarding Skillz $420 million in actual damages, according to a case timeline published by Shattered.io. The jury separately found that approximately 70% of the $6.7 billion in prize money Papaya advertised, roughly $4.7 billion, was never actually paid to human customers because bots "won" those prizes instead, according to a July 28, 2026 Firy Inc. press release. On July 27, 2026, Judge Cote entered judgment for $719 million in disgorgement, an equitable remedy that superseded the jury's damages award because a plaintiff may recover only once for the same injury, plus roughly $10.1 million in attorneys' fees, rejecting every post-trial motion Papaya filed to overturn or reduce the verdict, according to the same press release. Skillz, which rebranded to Firy Inc. (NYSE: FIRY) in June 2026, called it the largest false advertising recovery in U.S. history.
Papaya has disputed the ruling. The company has said the judgment "contains material errors" and that it intends to appeal both the liability finding and the damages amount to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, according to the Jerusalem Post. It maintains it no longer uses bots in its real-money head-to-head games.
The case moved through several distinct stages before the April 2026 trial. Skillz filed suit in March 2024; Papaya answered by denying the claims and, according to Casino.org's August 2024 coverage, rejecting the characterization of its bot use as deceptive. In April 2025, Papaya countersued, alleging Skillz had made its own admissions about bot use, according to a Casino.org report on the countersuit.
On October 27, 2025, Judge Cote denied Papaya's motion for summary judgment in a 35-page opinion, finding Skillz had presented enough evidence for a jury to decide the false-advertising claims, according to a summary from advocacy site Gambling Harm. That ruling arrived just before the Stephen A. Smith ambassador deal was announced, and the case went to an eight-person jury less than six months later.
Why the Case Matters Beyond Papaya and Skillz
Legal analysts have described the verdict as a warning shot for the broader real-money skill-gaming industry. A client alert from law firm Sheppard Mullin called the case a signal that "transparency and integrity across the broader skill-based gaming industry" are now squarely subject to false-advertising exposure, not just gambling regulation, according to the firm's May 2026 client alert. A separate analysis from Regulatory Oversight framed the ruling as evidence that regulators and courts are now more willing to test the "skill" label mobile game operators use to avoid gambling law, rather than accepting it at face value. For Papaya specifically, the judgment converted a profitable, largely self-funded consumer app business into an insolvency case within a single U.S. court calendar year.
Regulatory Scrutiny Beyond the Skillz Case
The Skillz verdict was not Papaya's first brush with regulators. On October 3, 2024, the Michigan Gaming Control Board issued a cease-and-desist letter accusing Papaya of operating illegal, unlicensed gambling through Solitaire Cash, Bingo Cash, Bubble Cash and 21 Cash, following an investigation triggered by an anonymous tip, according to an official MGCB release. The board said Papaya's apps violated Michigan's Lawful Internet Gaming Act, its Gaming Control and Revenue Act, and the state penal code, and gave the company 14 days to block Michigan residents or face legal action, including felony exposure of up to 10 years in prison or a $100,000 fine under state law. Papaya responded that it was reviewing the letter and believed it complied with applicable law, per ClickOnDetroit's coverage at the time.
The 2026 Insolvency Proceedings in Tel Aviv
Facing a judgment several times larger than its cash reserves, Papaya applied to the Tel Aviv District Court on August 2, 2026, for a supervised debt arrangement, and to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware on August 3 for Chapter 15 recognition, a cross-border insolvency mechanism designed to coordinate proceedings across jurisdictions. Tel Aviv District Judge Iris Lushi-Abudi granted a temporary stay on August 2, writing that Papaya had acknowledged it is "unable to pay the debt owed to Skillz if that debt becomes enforceable, as well as their remaining debts," according to Casino.org, which obtained a copy of the filing. On August 9, 2026, Delaware Bankruptcy Judge Mary F. Walrath granted a temporary injunction blocking U.S. collection efforts against Papaya's assets pending a recognition hearing, rejecting Skillz's request that Papaya post a financial guarantee, according to CTech's report on the ruling.
On August 25, 2026, Judge Lushi-Abudi told Papaya's counsel that its proposed arrangement, based solely on projected operating income over six and a half years, needed revision to include direct shareholder contributions and an active search for an outside investor, according to Globes. She noted the difficulty of attracting new capital, questioning why an investor would commit $300 million for a 20% to 30% stake in a company facing a roughly $700 million judgment, and said shareholders who had drawn a $10 million dividend at the end of 2025 should be prepared to reinvest. Papaya has said the process is intended to preserve normal operations, continued pay for its roughly 300 remaining employees, and uninterrupted player withdrawals while the U.S. appeal proceeds, a position the company has repeated in filings reported by the Jerusalem Post, CTech and Casino.org throughout August 2026.
For a closer look at that August 25 hearing, see Papaya Gaming's debt plan rework.
Watch Points
- Whether Papaya's revised debt plan can attract an outside investor willing to buy into a company carrying a roughly $700 million contingent liability.
- The outcome of Papaya's appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which will determine whether the $719 million judgment stands, shrinks or is reversed.
- Whether other U.S. states follow Michigan's 2024 lead in challenging the legal basis for real-money "skill-based" tournament apps.
- How the 30-person layoff and AI-driven restructuring announced in July 2026 affects product development at Solitaire Cash, Bingo Cash and Bubble Cash.
- Whether ESPN or other media partners re-engage with Papaya once the litigation and insolvency proceedings resolve.
FAQ
What is Papaya Gaming?
Papaya Gaming is a Tel Aviv-based mobile gaming company that turns casual games such as solitaire, bingo and bubble-shooter formats into skill-based tournaments where players pay entry fees to compete for real cash prizes. Its main titles are Solitaire Cash, Bingo Cash, Bubble Cash and 21 Cash.
Who founded Papaya Gaming?
Papaya Gaming was co-founded by CEO Oriel Bachar, CTO Andrey Birman, VP of R&D Alex Liakhovetsky and VP of Product Yonatan Zvik. Company listings on Crunchbase and the Jerusalem Post date the founding to 2016 or 2017, while Tracxn and NeonRiver date it to 2019.
Why did Papaya Gaming lose $719 million to Skillz?
A federal jury and Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York found that Papaya advertised its games as fair, human-versus-human competitions while secretly using computer bots, including bots that produced predetermined outcomes, in roughly a quarter of its tournaments between 2021 and 2024.
Is Papaya Gaming the same company as Papaya Global?
No. Papaya Global is a separate, unrelated Israeli-founded payroll and workforce-management company led by CEO Eynat Guez. Papaya Gaming is the mobile games company behind Solitaire Cash and the defendant in the Skillz lawsuit.
Is Papaya Gaming still operating?
Yes. As of August 2026, Papaya says it continues normal operations, including employee pay, supplier payments and player withdrawals, while it pursues a supervised debt arrangement in Israel and an appeal of the U.S. judgment.
בעברית
פאפאיה גיימינג היא חברת משחקי מובייל מתל אביב שמייסדיה, בהם המנכ"ל אוריאל בכר, ה-CTO אנדריי בירמן, סמנכ"ל המחקר והפיתוח אלכס ליאחובצקי וסמנכ"ל המוצר יונתן זוויק, הפכו משחקים קזואליים כמו סוליטר ובינגו לטורנירים מבוססי-מיומנות בתשלום. בשנת 2026 חייבה זאת החברה בפיצוי של 719 מיליון דולר לחברת סקילז האמריקאית, בעקבות שימוש בבוטים ממוחשבים שהוסתר מהמשתמשים. החברה נכנסת כעת להליך הסדר חוב מפוקח בבית המשפט המחוזי בתל אביב. מקורות: Jerusalem Post, גלובס.
The Olam Editorial Team