Kinoa pushes AI-native mobile app revenue operations after raising $10M in funding

Mobile application operations startup Kinoa Labs Ltd. said today it has raked in $10 million in funding to help app developers unlock more revenue from their users with its artificial intelligence-native software.

Transcend Fund led the round, which also saw participation from Sisu Game Ventures. The money will support the startup’s mission of giving games and consumer app companies the tools they need to better engage with and monetize their users.

Kinoa’s founders say they launched the startup amid a structural shift in the mobile market, which saw user acquisition costs soar by an average of 40% and targeting efficiency decline significantly. As a result, many mobile app operators have shifted to focus on customer retention, which is where Kinoa’s autonomous AI agents are designed to excel. The startup transforms user data into real-time intelligence, enabling companies to anticipate which users are likely to churn, who will become a high spender, and then determine which offers to surface for each type at the most appropriate moment.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Elias Sandler said 78% of the top thousand mobile games have seen their revenue decline over the last year. Kinoa aims to turn that around by using AI agents with “predictive superpowers,” he said. “By connecting this intelligence to real-time execution, we’re enabling a single operator to deliver the precision, speed and revenue impact of a ten-person team using our AI-powered operating system.”

Before, companies would need to undergo a multiyear build process to start driving revenue from their applications,.Kinoa provides them with an immediate alternative. At the core of its platform is an “execution layer” that allows application operators to deliver dynamic and personalized in-app experiences, push notifications, feature changes and real-time user segmentation.

There’s also an “intelligence layer” made up of a suite of predictive AI models, which try to anticipate what each user is going to do while simultaneously detecting anomalies. This intelligence makes it easier to extract the maximum revenue per user, while also enabling companies to take action before any problems occur with their existing revenue streams.

The startup says it helps the average application operator to increase its revenue by around 25%, which is why it’s already being used by multiple games and application developers, including Playstudios Inc., Playsimple Games Ltd., Modern Times Group AB and Gammagrl LLC.

Or Reznitsky, who manages the hit mobile game Tetris Block Party for Playstudios, said the impact of Kinoa’s AI agents was almost immediate, helping his team to increase payer conversion by 46% and bump up its overall revenue by 31% within just days. “Kinoa gave us the ability to reach every user with the right experience at the right moment through personalized messages, dynamic offers, real-time feature changes, all without touching a line of code,” he explained.

Despite the strong focus on mobile games developers, Sandler stressed that Kinoa is not only for gaming applications. The startup originally targeted games because it’s the segment where app operations are most mature, but it soon realized that the predictive capabilities it provides can be useful for any kind of application, including entertainment, streaming, education and productivity apps.

With today’s funding, Kinoa plans to invest in its predictive models and enhance their capabilities so they can automate more of the mobile app operations process and drive even more revenue gains for customers.

“Most mobile teams have more user data than they can act on,” said Transcend Fund Managing Director Andrew Sheppard. “Kinoa turns that data into real-time decisions and execution, which is why we see LiveOps moving from manual workflows to intelligent infrastructure and beyond.”

Image: Kinoa