Kazimi closes €2.2 million pre-seed round in Berlin
Mobile cybersecurity start-up Kazimi has closed a €2.2 million pre-seed round to tackle a problem that has quietly undermined the mobile industry for years: bots polluting the data app marketers rely on. Kazimi wants to give app developers a clearer view of which user signals are real and which come from bots.
The round was oversubscribed. Market One Capital led the investment, with IBB Ventures and several mobile industry executives joining in. Backers include former Rovio CTO Petri Hyökyranta, ex-Supercell data scientist Janne Peltola, and Erik Massmann, who previously served as CFO of the Birkenstock Group and Sportradar AG.
What Kazimi actually does
Kazimi secures the communication signals inside an app. In practice, this means app developers can collect and verify their own first-party data, spot non-human bot activity, and separate genuine users from fake ones. Kazimi built the system to be privacy-preserving and compliant with data regulations, using cryptographic proofs rather than methods that expose user data.
Andreas Naumann, Kazimi’s co-founder and chief product officer, said it has never been technically possible for developers to see clearly which signals come from real users and which come from bots. He believes Kazimi’s approach closes that gap and lets developers protect what he calls their most important resource: first-party data.
Why the timing suits Kazimi
The scale of the problem is growing. Global mobile ad spend hit USD 419 billion in 2025, according to Business of Apps, and Udonis expects it to pass USD 1 trillion by 2035. That growth makes accurate data increasingly valuable, and increasingly worth faking.
Cloudflare reported that bots officially overtook human activity on the internet for the first time in 2026. Meanwhile, AppsFlyer’s latest report on mobile ad fraud found that bot attacks now drive the vast majority of fraudulent activity across mobile channels. As a result, marketers are making decisions based on data that may already be compromised.
Erik Massmann, Kazimi investor and former CFO of the Birkenstock Group and Sportradar AG, put the problem bluntly: the bot crisis in mobile marketing is the elephant in the room, since everyone in the industry already knows mobile channels lack transparency and trust. He argued that understanding what’s real and what isn’t has never mattered more, both for using AI effectively and for cutting out fraud.
Founders with a track record in fraud detection
Kazimi’s founding team previously built the security and fraud detection systems at Adjust, the mobile measurement company AppLovin acquired in 2021 for roughly USD 1 billion. They have also built similar systems for other mobile analytics companies and ad networks, giving them direct experience with the scale of the bot problem before founding Kazimi.
Petri Hyökyranta, who has known the founders for some time, backed Kazimi because its approach lets businesses detect bots at scale while staying compliant and privacy-preserving. He called it a paradigm shift for the mobile industry.
What Kazimi will do with the funding
Kazimi plans to use the new capital to scale its product and go after the wider mobile ad spend market. Jacek Lubinski, partner at Market One Capital and the round’s lead investor, said Kazimi could become a fundamental security layer for the global app economy in the AI era, providing secure, accurate first-party data while staying fully privacy-preserving.
Kazimi already works with mobile gaming studios, rewards platforms, and fintech apps. Its solution targets any app that spends marketing budget to acquire new customers or retain existing ones, a group that covers much of the mobile industry.
The bigger picture for Kazimi
Kazimi’s launch sits inside a wider shift in how the internet works. As bots increasingly outnumber genuine human traffic online, businesses across sectors are having to rethink how they verify authentic activity. For mobile app developers specifically, that shift raises the stakes on getting first-party data right, since flawed signals feed directly into both analytics and AI-driven decisions. Kazimi’s pre-seed round suggests investors see a real opportunity in solving that problem before it gets worse.
Frequently Asked Questions about Kasimi
Kazimi is a Berlin-based mobile cybersecurity start-up. It helps app developers secure their first-party data, detect bot activity, and separate real users from fake ones in a privacy-preserving way.
Kazimi raised €2.2 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round led by Market One Capital, with participation from IBB Ventures and several mobile industry executives.
Global mobile ad spend reached USD 419 billion in 2025 and is expected to exceed USD 1 trillion by 2035. At the same time, Cloudflare reported that bots overtook human activity on the internet for the first time in 2026, and AppsFlyer found that bot attacks drive most fraudulent activity on mobile channels.
Kazimi’s founders previously built the security and fraud detection systems at Adjust, the mobile measurement company acquired by AppLovin in 2021 for around USD 1 billion. They have also built fraud-detection systems for other mobile analytics companies and ad networks.
Kazimi’s clients include mobile gaming studios, rewards platforms, and fintech apps, along with other businesses that spend marketing budgets to acquire and retain app users.
Picture Credits: Iraj Larik
