London-based Kohort has raised $7 million in Series A funding to expand its platform for user acquisition agents aimed at mobile game studios. The round was led by The Raine Group, which had also backed the company’s earlier seed financing and has worked with Kohort commercially over recent months. The announcement positions Kohort at the intersection of mobile gaming, predictive analytics and AI-driven campaign operations, where studios are under pressure to scale player acquisition without wasting marketing budgets.
Funding and Product Focus
Kohort said the new capital will support the development of a broader suite of user acquisition tools, led by its campaign optimization product, Ktrl. The product generates network-specific bidding strategies and campaign targets, supporting ROAS, CPI and CPE/CPA campaign types while integrating directly with ad networks. The company says its system is designed to help studios move campaigns toward profitable acquisition outcomes by improving the signals passed back to ad platforms.
Building an AI-Native UA Operating Layer
The company’s wider product roadmap includes agents for campaign optimization, deep research and automated reporting. Kohort says these tools can analyze UA trends against a studio’s own historical data and compare findings with spending benchmarks from more than $1 billion in annual spend flowing through its platform. Its models are trained on $6 billion of historical UA spend across hundreds of games, with the company claiming daily campaign-level predictions at 95% accuracy and client-specific model training in under 20 minutes.
Market Context and Expansion Plans
Kohort’s pitch reflects a growing shift in mobile games marketing, where rising acquisition costs and fragmented campaign data have made efficiency a strategic priority. In an interview with PocketGamer.biz, CEO and co-founder Dan Marcus said the company is raising now because Ktrl has shown early traction, including more than $1 billion in UA already managed during its beta period. The company currently has 18 employees across the UK, Europe and Cape Town and aims to grow to roughly 25 by year-end, with much of the investment expected to go toward data science and machine learning talent.
Investor Backing and Industry Reception
The Raine Group’s participation extends an existing relationship with Kohort and gives the startup a specialist backer with experience across technology, media, telecoms and entertainment markets. Public LinkedIn posts from Kohort and Marcus framed the round as validation of the company’s approach, thanking customers, early adopters, investors and the wider team while emphasizing the difficulty of scaling user acquisition profitably. Additional coverage from PocketGamer.biz highlighted Kohort’s view that AI should not fully replace human decision-making in high-stakes marketing workflows, but should instead improve speed, reliability, auditability and recommendation quality.
Kohort’s Series A arrives as mobile studios look for more disciplined ways to manage acquisition spend and convert data into faster operating decisions. By combining forecasting, bidding recommendations, research and reporting into a UA-focused agent suite, the company is attempting to build an AI-native operating layer for growth teams rather than a standalone analytics dashboard. The next test will be whether Kohort can translate early gaming traction into broader adoption, deepen its technical advantage and prove that predictive user acquisition can scale across studios and eventually adjacent app categories.