Andy Zhong

Co-Founder and CEO FunPlus

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Andy Zhong is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of FunPlus, one of the largest privately held and bootstrapped companies in global gaming. He started the business in Silicon Valley in the early 2010s with Yitao Guan, now the company’s Chief Technology Officer, first under the name Halfquest and building browser games, before the pair rebuilt it around mobile strategy and simulation titles. The result is a catalogue of unusually long-lived hits — King of Avalon, Guns of Glory and State of Survival, the last with more than 100 million downloads — and a company that has never taken the venture-to-IPO route common among its peers. Zhong is a computer scientist by training, with a research-engineering start at Bell Laboratories and product and engineering leadership at RockYou before he became a founder, and he relocated FunPlus’s global corporate headquarters to Switzerland in 2020, an unusual choice for a studio with both Chinese and Californian roots.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded the company that became FunPlus with Yitao Guan and has served as Chief Executive Officer since.
• Built FunPlus into one of gaming’s largest privately held, bootstrapped companies, reported to have passed $1 billion in revenue.
• Oversaw the 2016 sale of subsidiary DianDian Interactive to Shenzhen-listed Century Group for a reported $1 billion; the studio became Century Game.
• Shipped and sustained a run of strategy and simulation hits — King of Avalon (2016), Guns of Glory (2017), State of Survival (2019, over 100 million downloads), Call of Antia (2022) and Sea of Conquest (2024).
• Relocated the group’s global corporate headquarters to Switzerland in 2020.
• Acquired Imagendary Studios in April 2021, bringing high-end art and creative development in house.
• Began his career as a research engineer at Bell Laboratories and held engineering roles at Oracle and Ask.com before moving into games.
• Awarded an honorary Doctor of Computer Science by Maharishi International University in 2020; sits on the university’s Board of Trustees.

Professional Journey

Zhong’s route into games ran through infrastructure engineering rather than entertainment. He took an undergraduate computer science degree at Dalian University of Technology in China, then a master’s in computer science through Maharishi International University’s Computer Professionals Program in the United States. His first role was as a research engineer at Bell Laboratories, followed by engineering positions at Oracle and Ask.com — a conventional Silicon Valley technical track.

The shift came through social gaming. He moved to RockYou as an engineering director and product management lead during the Facebook-platform boom, then to TheGameNet.com as vice president of engineering and product. That period gave him direct experience of the economics that would define his own company — free-to-play monetisation, live operations, and building games as continuously updated services rather than boxed products.

He and Yitao Guan started their own studio in San Francisco in the early 2010s, originally called Halfquest and focused on browser games. Family Farm, its first significant hit, established the company in the social-simulation genre. The business rebranded as FunPlus after relocating to Beijing, and over the following years moved decisively onto mobile, where the strategy genre — persistent worlds, alliance mechanics, long player lifetimes — proved the better fit for its live-operations strength. King of Avalon arrived in 2016 and Guns of Glory in 2017; both remained commercially significant for years afterwards, a pattern the company repeated with State of Survival in 2019, which passed 100 million downloads.

A defining moment came in 2016 when FunPlus sold its DianDian Interactive subsidiary to Century Group, a Shenzhen-listed company, for a reported $1 billion. The studio was renamed Century Game and went on independently. The sale left FunPlus itself unusually well capitalised without outside investors, and it has remained private and bootstrapped — a genuine outlier at its revenue scale, where competitors are typically either publicly listed or owned by a larger publisher.

In 2020 Zhong moved FunPlus’s global corporate headquarters to Switzerland, reorienting the company as an international publisher rather than a Chinese or American one. The following year he acquired Imagendary Studios, adding in-house art and creative development. More recent releases — Call of Antia in 2022, Sea of Conquest in 2024, and a 2025 slate including Foundation and DC-licensed titles — reflect a broader push into licensed and genre-diverse output. Zhong has described his own role as having shifted from hands-on product and hiring work towards culture, long-range vision and delegation, and he is open about the practices that sustain it, including a long-standing transcendental meditation habit.

Education

Maharishi International University

Master of Science, Computer Science. Also awarded an honorary Doctor of Computer Science (honoris causa) in 2020.

Dalian University of Technology

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science