Berlin-based Kazimi has raised EUR 2.2 million in pre-seed funding to sell mobile app developers something the advertising industry has quietly stopped taking for granted — proof that the user on the other end is a person.

The oversubscribed round was led by Market One Capital, with IBB Ventures participating alongside three angels: Petri Hyokyranta, former CTO of Rovio; Janne Peltola, a former Supercell data scientist; and Erik Massmann, former CFO of Birkenstock Group and Sportradar. No valuation was disclosed. The company was founded in 2024 by Chase Gummer (CEO), August Joseph (CTO), Ville Mikkola (COO) and Andreas Naumann (CPO). Some deal databases list the round at USD 3 million; every published account of the deal puts it at EUR 2.2 million.

What the company does

Kazimi secures the communication signals an app generates, so developers can collect and verify first-party data, identify non-human activity and keep user privacy intact. Rather than profiling users, it applies privacy-preserving cryptographic proofs to confirm that an interaction happened as claimed — an approach built on zero-knowledge proofs rather than on the behavioural fingerprinting most anti-fraud tooling depends on.

The founding team came out of Adjust, the Berlin mobile measurement company acquired by AppLovin in 2021, where they worked on security and fraud detection systems. Kazimi supports the major mobile platforms, app frameworks, engines and BI systems, and counts mobile gaming studios, rewards platforms and fintech apps among its customers.

The numbers behind the round

EUR 2.2 million is a conventional European pre-seed cheque, and the company says the money will go toward scaling its technology and expanding its presence in the global mobile advertising market. That market is the argument for the raise: mobile ad spend reached roughly USD 419 billion in 2025 and is projected to pass USD 1 trillion by 2035.

The investor mix is the more informative figure. Berlin-based IBB Ventures supplies the local institutional anchor, while the angels are operators drawn from precisely the customer segment Kazimi sells into. Hyokyranta and Peltola spent years inside Rovio and Supercell respectively, two of the largest mobile gaming studios in Europe, and Massmann's CFO tenure at Sportradar sits in a business whose product is data integrity at scale.

Why the timing matters

Mobile marketing has absorbed two shocks at once over the past five years. Apple's App Tracking Transparency and the wider retreat from third-party identifiers pushed advertisers toward first-party data, while cheap automation made that data easier to fake. If a developer can no longer follow a user across apps, the signals its own app produces become the basis for attribution, ad spend and, increasingly, fraud.

That is the gap Kazimi is aiming at, and it explains why a security company is being funded as advertising infrastructure. The pitch is not fraud detection after the fact but verification at the point the signal is created. It arrives as automated traffic turns a single question — was this a person? — into one that ad networks, rewards platforms and fintech apps are each answering separately, and expensively, today.

Source

Tech.eu — "Kazimi raises EUR 2.2M pre-seed to tackle bot activity in mobile marketing"