Kohort Lands $7M to Arm Gaming Studios with AI User Acquisition Agents

LONDON, UK – May 07, 2026 – Mobile gaming analytics firm Kohort has secured a $7 million Series A funding round and unveiled a full suite of AI-powered User Acquisition (UA) agents, aiming to transform how game studios acquire players. The investment was led by global merchant bank The Raine Group, which also participated in Kohort’s 2025 seed round, signaling strong investor confidence in the company's specialized approach to one of the mobile industry's most complex challenges.

The funding will fuel the development of Kohort’s UA operating system, which leverages predictive AI to automate and optimize marketing spend. The launch comes at a critical time for the mobile gaming industry, which is grappling with privacy-related data restrictions, intense market saturation, and escalating user acquisition costs.

AI Agents vs. Ad-Tech Headwinds

The landscape for mobile user acquisition has become notoriously difficult. The impact of Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework and other privacy regulations has fragmented the data signals that marketers once relied on, making efficient ad targeting a significant hurdle. Coupled with fierce competition and rising costs, mobile game studios are under immense pressure to ensure every dollar of their marketing budget is effective.

Kohort argues that many existing UA tools are ill-equipped for this new reality, describing them as naively optimizing campaigns with little context. The company’s core thesis is that in this environment, accurate long-term prediction is the only context that truly matters. To that end, it has built a suite of AI agents trained on a massive dataset of $6 billion in historical UA spend.

This new suite focuses on three primary capabilities:

• Campaign Optimization: The flagship product, Ktrl, is designed to act as an automated UA manager. It generates network-specific bidding strategies for ROAS, CPI, and CPE campaigns, integrating directly with ad networks to steer each campaign toward what the company calls “100% ROAS.”

• Deep Research: This agent functions as an on-demand analyst, allowing studios to investigate any UA trend. It cross-references queries against the studio's own historical data and benchmarks it against the more than $1 billion in annual ad spend currently flowing through the Kohort platform.

• Automated Reporting: To streamline internal communication and strategy, this agent automatically generates detailed reports and presentation decks, ensuring that all teams, from the C-suite to product managers, are working from a single, consistent source of data.

Underpinning these tools are predictive models that Kohort claims can deliver daily, campaign-specific forecasts with 95% accuracy. The platform is built to integrate with a studio's existing data infrastructure, training client-specific models in under 20 minutes.

"We are building agents - not just a Claude wrapper - and the predictions underneath them, to make that possible," said Dan Marcus, CEO of Kohort. "The best UA teams operate more like high-frequency traders than marketers, and they need agents that act on real context, not vague signals."

The Raine Group's Strategic Bet on Vertical AI

The Raine Group’s decision to lead the Series A round and expand its partnership is a significant vote of confidence. As a prominent investor with deep roots in the technology, media, and telecom (TMT) sectors, Raine has a history of backing winners in the gaming space, including DraftKings, Mythical Games, and Tripledot Studios. This continued investment in Kohort highlights a broader trend in venture capital: a shift toward funding specialized, or 'vertical', AI companies that solve specific, high-value industry problems.

For Raine, Kohort represents more than just a sophisticated analytics tool. It's a foundational platform with the potential to redefine a critical business function. The nine-month commercial partnership preceding the investment gave the bank a firsthand look at the platform's capabilities and its lean, AI-native team.

"Kohort has a clear pathway to become a category-defining platform in UA Agents, and solve the biggest problem in mobile apps today," commented John Salter, Partner and Co-Founder at The Raine Group. "The Kohort team is lean, AI-native and delivers high quality results at speed."

This sentiment reflects a growing investor appetite for companies that apply AI with surgical precision rather than creating general-purpose tools. By focusing exclusively on the complex dynamics of mobile UA, Kohort is positioning itself as an indispensable partner for studios navigating a challenging market.

Navigating a Crowded and Complex Battlefield

Kohort enters a competitive but fragmented market. It will compete on various fronts with established attribution platforms like AppsFlyer and Adjust, which are the bedrock of mobile measurement. It also faces the powerful, self-optimizing ad systems of tech giants like Google, Meta, and TikTok, as well as major ad networks like AppLovin and ironSource, which have their own embedded AI.

However, Kohort's differentiation lies in its positioning as an overarching intelligence layer—an operating system that works across these platforms. While ad networks optimize within their own ecosystems, Kohort aims to provide a holistic, network-agnostic strategy based on its predictive models. Its ability to integrate directly into a studio's own data warehouse and rapidly train custom models distinguishes it from one-size-fits-all solutions.

This approach is designed to empower a studio’s internal team, augmenting their skills rather than replacing them entirely. The goal is to provide the analytical firepower of a senior UA manager at the click of a button, freeing up human experts to focus on high-level strategy, creative development, and partnership management.

The Future of Funding: Predictive AI and UA Financing

Perhaps the most forward-looking aspect of the partnership is the potential application of Kohort's technology beyond campaign management. In his statement, Salter explicitly pointed to this, noting, "We believe that Kohort’s predictive LTV capabilities and UA optimization technology provide the building blocks for future partnership opportunities, including the potential for a new product around user acquisition financing."

User acquisition financing is a form of non-dilutive capital where funds are provided specifically for marketing spend, with repayment tied to the revenue generated from the newly acquired users. This model has gained traction as an alternative to equity financing, but its success hinges on one crucial factor: predictability. Lenders need to be confident that the ad spend will generate a positive return.

This is where Kohort's technology could be a game-changer. By providing highly accurate, campaign-level ROAS predictions, the platform can effectively de-risk UA investments for capital providers. A studio with a proven track record on the Kohort platform could present its predictive data to lenders as evidence of future performance, potentially unlocking access to larger and more flexible lines of credit for growth. This could transform UA spend from a volatile marketing expense into a predictable, financeable asset, creating a new synergy between ad-tech and fintech.