Why Transcend Invested In Kinoa

The mobile gaming market is in the middle of a correction that most teams are not yet equipped for. The playbook that defined the last decade - buy installs, recover through monetization, repeat - is breaking down at both ends. According to Adjust's 2026 Gaming App Insights Report, gaming cost-per-install rose approximately 30% year-over-year, cost-per-click approximately 33%, and cost-per-mille approximately 20%. At the same time, AppsFlyer's 2025 data, reported in 2026, shows that remarketing spend rose from 25% to 29% of total app marketing budgets - up roughly 37% year-over-year to $31.3 billion - while gaming user acquisition spend grew by only 3%.

The industry is not waiting for a recovery in paid acquisition efficiency. It is making a structural move toward the users it already has. That shift is not a trend; it is a platform transition. And it creates the clearest kind of opening for a company like Kinoa.

We are proud to announce that Kinoa has raised $10 million in funding led by Transcend Fund, with participation from Sisu Game Ventures, and that my partner Shanti Bergel has joined the board. Shanti has spent 35 years operating through the platform and business model shifts that reshaped games, and he brings that perspective to Kinoa as mobile operations move from manual workflows to intelligent infrastructure.

THE RETENTION ECONOMY ARRIVES

For most mobile studios, the gap between the signals they can see and the actions they can take is measured in days. A live ops team identifies churn risk, drafts an offer, routes it through product and engineering, schedules a build, and by the time the message reaches the user, the moment has passed. LiveOps as it is practiced today is reactive, manual, and constrained by release cycles that have nothing to do with how users actually behave.

Kinoa was built from the premise that this gap is not an execution problem - it is an architecture problem. The existing stack was designed for campaigns, not for continuous, personalized, real-time engagement at scale. Patching that stack does not close the gap. Replacing it does.

What Kinoa has built is an AI operating system for mobile app operations. Its Intelligence Layer runs predictive models across a company's entire user base continuously - identifying who is likely to churn, who is approaching a spending threshold, which offer will land for which segment, and when. Its Execution Layer turns those predictions into action: personalized in-app experiences, push notifications, real-time segmentation, and feature changes, delivered without a code release. The two layers are designed to work together, not as discrete tools, but as a single system that closes the loop between knowing and doing.

Kinoa reports that the platform consistently delivers over 25% revenue lift across its customer base. Or Reznitsky, General Manager of Tetris Block Party at Playstudios, described the impact firsthand: "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. The impact was immediate and Kinoa helped us achieve a 31% revenue increase and a 46% lift in payer conversion."

Playstudios is not alone. Playsimple, Modern Times Group (MTG), and GammaTime Shorts are among the dozens of mobile gaming and app companies already on the platform.

OPERATORS BUILT FOR THIS PROBLEM

Kinoa was founded by veterans of Playtika, Amazon, and Skai - three organizations with deep roots in performance marketing, large-scale consumer products, and mobile monetization. That combination is not incidental. Building an AI operating system for live mobile operations is not just an engineering problem. It requires an unusually precise understanding of how live ops teams actually work: where they spend their time, where decisions stall, what it takes to earn trust from operators who are accountable for real revenue every day.

The founding team has lived inside that problem at scale. They have seen the manual workflows, the release-cycle bottlenecks, the intelligence sitting unused in dashboards that nobody has time to act on. Kinoa's architecture reflects that experience in every design choice - which is why it integrates into existing stacks rather than requiring teams to rebuild around it.

CEO Elias Sandler describes the ambition clearly: "Kinoa gives teams predictive superpowers, knowing exactly who will churn or pay before the signals are even visible. 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." That is a claim about architecture, not features.

The founding team's credibility is one reason the platform is trusted by live ops teams running real revenue today, not pilots.

AI AS OPERATING ARCHITECTURE, NOT FEATURE

We invest at the intersection of games and AI where the integration is genuine - not AI bolted onto a legacy product as a capability add, but AI as the underlying operating architecture. Kinoa is one of the clearest examples of what that means in practice.

Most tools in the live ops category offer analytics or messaging. Some add automation. Kinoa's structure is different: the predictive and execution layers are not modules - they are the product. Every action the Execution Layer takes generates feedback that sharpens the Intelligence Layer's next prediction. Every customer on the platform contributes to the training signal that makes the models more precise. The business compounds as it grows, which is exactly the dynamic we look for in early-stage infrastructure.

This matters beyond games. The retention challenge Kinoa addresses - converting passive behavioral data into real-time, personalized engagement without an engineering lift - is not unique to mobile gaming. It is the challenge facing any consumer app operating at scale. Kinoa is building toward a category that is larger than its current entry point.

WHY NOW, WHY THIS TEAM

The macro context does not make the investment thesis - the product and team do. But the context does clarify the timing. The shift from acquisition to retention is accelerating precisely because independent industry data, from Adjust and AppsFlyer, confirms that the old model's economics are structurally impaired. Studios that relied on paid acquisition to paper over weak retention now face a compounding problem. The companies that move first on intelligent live operations will build a durable operational advantage.

We have followed Kinoa's development closely and watched customer traction deepen quarter over quarter. The combination of founder depth, architectural clarity, early customer evidence, and a macro environment that is moving directly toward them made this a conviction investment.

WHAT WE ARE BUILDING TOGETHER

The $10 million in funding will support expansion of Kinoa's predictive models and the deployment of a new generation of AI agents that automate mobile app operations across the customer base.

We are proud to partner with Elias and the Kinoa team. The mobile market is entering a period where operational intelligence - not creative spend - will determine which studios compound and which stall. We believe Kinoa is building the infrastructure layer that makes the difference.

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ABOUT ANDREW SHEPPARD

Andrew is Managing Director at Transcend. A gaming executive with over 20 years of operational experience, he has built consumer businesses generating over $6 billion in revenue across console, PC, and mobile. Previously, Andrew was President of Studios at Kabam, where he drove 100%+ annual revenue growth, scaling the company to $400M in peak ARR and a $1B+ exit. He also served as CEO of GREE International and Head of Strategy at EA Maxis. Andrew holds an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas and currently serves on the boards of GDEV (NASDAQ), Virtuos Holdings, Ruckus Games, Fun Country, Eggscape, Live Aware Labs, and WeLevel.

ABOUT TRANSCEND

Transcend is a top quartile early-stage venture firm that backs AI-native entrepreneurs building the next generation of interactive entertainment. In a $263B global industry where AI is rewriting the economics, we partner with the founders leading that shift from pre-seed through Series A. Founded in 2020 by veterans with 70+ years of operator experience and $10B+ in lifetime revenue. Learn more at transcend.fund and follow us on LinkedIn.