Exclusive: Kohort raises $7m to build UA AI agents for mobile

• Kohort is developing a suite of AI tools and agents, including Ktrl, which created network-specific bidding strategies and targets for campaigns.
• CEO and co-founder Dan Marcus says Kohort is bullish on AI as customers' appetite for agentic solutions has arrived.
• The Series A investment round was led by The Raine Group, which previously backed the company in its seed round.

Mobile analytics, forecasting and UA optimisation firm Kohort has raised $7 million in a Series A funding round to build user acquisition agents for mobile studios.

Kohort is developing a suite of AI tools for what it calls its UA operating system. Its flagship product Ktrl creates network-specific bidding strategies and targets for campaigns, supporting ROAS, CPI and CPE/CPA campaign types.

The company’s AI agents also support research into UA trends, which it said can be cross-referenced against a studio’s historical data and benchmarked against $1 billion in annual spend through Kohort’s platform.

Kohort said its agents are trained on $6bn of historical UA spend across hundreds of games.

"Ground floor of agentic UA"

The company currently employs 18 staff across the UK, Europe and Cape Town. It aims to grow to approximately 25 by the end of the year.

The investment round was led by The Raine Group, which previously invested in Kohort's seed round last year.

“A year ago, we raised to build Ktrl. Today we're raising because Ktrl works,” co-founder and CEO Dan Marcus told PocketGamer.biz.

“The beta we ran across late '25 and early '26 has shown very promising results and early signs of scale, with over $1bn in UA managed already. Our view, shared by our investors, is that this is a moment to accelerate rather than pace ourselves.

“The capital goes into three things: doubling down on our gaming traction, extending into verticals beyond gaming this year and continuing to push our lead in AI-native UA. We're at the ground floor of agentic UA, and there's a real opportunity to be the first genuinely AI-first product in this category. Most of the spend goes into data science and ML talent.”

Time sink

Co-founder Jan Pickard said in practical terms, Kohort’s suite of tools aim to help studios with campaign management, reporting and communication, and deep analysis.

Pickard said campaign management is the biggest time sink in UA as marketers track tens to hundreds of campaigns every couple of days.

“We think that loop can be almost entirely automated,” he explained. “Ktrl already does the hardest part of it: knowing what early ROAS signal to feed each campaign is genuinely difficult, and most data science teams don't have the capacity to own a recommendation engine for it. Ktrl tells UA teams which campaigns to scale, which to cut, and feeds the precise ROAS signal directly to the networks."

High user acquisition costs are one of the key challenges facing mobile games publishers. Marcus said he believes Kohort’s tools can make UA spend more efficient by “eliminating the assumptions that UA teams have to make every day”.

“Most waste in UA isn't dramatic,” he stated. “It's small inefficiencies compounding over weeks: acting on data that's already stale, missing a long-term trend that the early signal was hinting at, leaving a losing campaign live for three more days because nobody had time to validate it.

“The cost of those decisions is enormous over a quarter. Ktrl collapses that feedback loop by always having predictive data on hand for every decision. UA teams can scale with less waste, identify losing campaigns sooner, and stop throwing good money after bad.

“The mechanism, concretely, is the signal you send back to the ad network. Optimising a campaign is two things: creative, and the bid or ROAS target you pass to the network. Getting that signal right is the whole game. It tells the network whether to scale up or down on users, and whether the users it's already finding are profitable in your app. Right signal in, right users out, lower effective CPI and higher LTV.”

AI-focused

Marcus added that Kohort is bullish on AI as the future of the company as it becomes the underlying operating layer for how customer intelligence is processed and acted on.

“The reason we’re bullish is that the economics and capability curve have shifted materially over the last 24 months and importantly as a result of this, customers’ appetite for agentic solutions has arrived,” he said. 

“Tasks that required highly experienced teams such as identifying patterns across hundreds of data points and figuring out the correct actions, can now be done in near real time at scale.

“We don’t believe in ‘fully autonomous AI’ replacing decision-making, yet. In enterprise environments with real ad spend on the line, reliability, auditability, and workflow integration are key. Our view is that the winning products will combine AI with strong operational systems and human oversight.

“In terms of scale, the underlying AI models are already proven globally. The real question is not whether AI works, but whether it can be embedded into a business workflow in a way that consistently improves speed and quality of recommendations which ultimately improves profits. That is where Kohort is focused.”