Building a mobile product becomes more complicated when users expect it to feel like a social network, handle money with the clarity of a financial app, and still be enjoyable enough to open for its own sake.
Pure is building at that intersection as the company establishes itself in New York. Its first product is a mobile-only social poker experience built around friends playing and wagering with one another, but the larger ambition reaches beyond a single game. Pure is developing what it describes as a social entertainment platform where real-money experiences feel less like traditional online gaming and more like something people choose to do together.
That difference affects nearly every product decision. Social platforms depend on relationships and identity, financial products depend on trust, and multiplayer games depend on speed and reliability. Pure has to make all three work at once without asking users to think about the systems underneath.
Founder and CTO Harold Castiaux sits at the center of that technical challenge, working alongside founding engineer Florian Deroo and founding designer Eun Gyu Kil, known as Jessie. Their roles overlap more than the titles suggest because the product itself leaves little room for engineering, design, and business decisions to happen independently.
Building Around the Social Experience
Poker gives Pure a familiar starting point because the game has always been social. Friends already understand the basic rhythm of sitting together, competing, and reacting to one another, so the product challenge is less about inventing that behavior than preserving it when the table moves onto a phone.
Pure’s zero-rake model supports that effort. Traditional real-money platforms generally earn more when more money moves through the game, which can create incentives that sit uneasily beside the experience users want. Pure instead removes rake from play between friends, letting the company focus more on whether people return because they enjoy the social experience itself.
That puts unusual weight on the social graph underneath the game. Deroo’s engineering work includes building and scaling systems that represent relationships between users while maintaining the responsiveness expected of a real-time mobile product. Kil faces the same problem from another angle, deciding how much social information belongs on a small screen before helpful context turns into clutter.
Neither problem can be solved in isolation. Social features only feel natural when the underlying systems respond quickly enough, while technically sophisticated features add little if users cannot immediately understand what they are seeing.
Trust becomes part of the same equation. Pure has also put engineering attention into detecting bots and cheating because a social product depends on users believing the people and activity around them are legitimate. Once money is involved, confidence in those interactions matters even more.
Money Changes the Design Problem
Financial features tend to expose weak product decisions quickly. Users may tolerate an extra tap while browsing content, but the same friction feels different when they are depositing money, entering a game, or trying to understand what happened to a transaction.
That pushes Pure toward the expectations people now bring from consumer fintech, where payment flows are increasingly simple on the surface even when the infrastructure behind them is complex. Kil’s work on payment design therefore has to make financial actions feel straightforward without feeling careless, while Deroo’s engineering work has to support that experience with the reliability expected from a native iOS product.
Castiaux’s role connects those decisions back to the larger company. As CTO and a founder, he has to weigh technical elegance against what the product needs next, which gets harder when every feature touches multiple parts of the system. Improving a social interaction can affect multiplayer performance, while changing a payment flow may introduce new design and engineering requirements elsewhere.
Pure is also building during a period when AI gives small technical teams more leverage than they would have had only a few years ago. That does not remove the need for specialized engineering or design judgment, but it can reduce repetitive development work and allow a compact team to move across a broader product surface.
For a company operating across social networking, fintech, and mobile gaming, that leverage matters because the hardest work tends to happen between categories rather than neatly within one.
New York Gives the Company a Broader Technology Base
Pure’s move to New York places the company in a market where those categories already overlap. The city has deep communities in financial technology and consumer software, along with a growing gaming and startup ecosystem, giving the company access to people who understand different parts of the product it is trying to build.
That matters because Pure is not treating poker as the final category. The company sees real-money gaming as one of the few large consumer industries not yet reshaped as dramatically by mobile distribution and social product design as areas such as media, investing, or transportation.
Its first step is deliberately narrower, using poker to work through the difficult questions around real-time social play, payments, trust, and mobile performance before applying those lessons more broadly.
The result is a company that is easier to understand through the problems it is solving than through any single industry label. Pure is part social network, part fintech infrastructure, and part mobile game, with a founding team trying to make those layers feel like one product rather than three technologies stitched together.
