How a Berlin Startup's $2.4M Round Aims to Solve Mobile's Biggest Blind Spot

Jan de Vries · 2026-08-24

Let's talk about something that's been quietly driving mobile app developers crazy. You pour your heart into building an app, you spend on marketing, and you're collecting all this data. But here's the kicker—how much of that data is actually from a real person? That's the massive blind spot that a Berlin-based mobile cybersecurity startup, Kazimi, is trying to fix. And they just got a serious vote of confidence, closing a pre-Seed funding round of $2.4 million. Yeah, you read that right. For a company founded just this year, that's a strong start. ### The Investors Betting on Transparency The round was oversubscribed, which is always a good sign. It was led by Market One Capital, with IBB Ventures also jumping in. But what's really interesting is the lineup of industry veterans who personally backed this. We're talking about ex-Rovio CTO Petri Hyökyranta, ex-Supercell data scientist Janne Peltola, and Erik Massmann, the former CFO of Birkenstock and Sportradar AG. When people who've built billion-dollar mobile businesses put their money in, you know they see a real problem. So what's the problem, exactly? It's bots. Pure and simple. "Until now it's been technically impossible for app developers to have true visibility," explains Andreas Naumann, Kazimi's co-founder and chief product officer. "Which signals are from real users and which come from bots? We're closing that loop." Think about that for a second. The company's whole premise is that your most important resource—your first-party data—might be fundamentally flawed. If you can't trust where the data comes from, how can you make any real decisions? ### A Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight Kazimi points to a sobering Cloudflare statistic: in 2026, bots officially eclipsed human activity on the internet for the first time ever. Yet, most mobile businesses are still flying blind, unable to tell a bot signal from a real human interaction. Erik Massmann, one of those key angel investors, calls it the "elephant in the room." He says, "Everyone knows mobile channels are intransparent and lack trust. The ability to understand what's real and what's not has never been more important—both for using AI effectively and getting rid of fraud." He's hitting on two huge pain points there. First, fraud drains budgets. Second, if you're feeding AI models garbage data from bots, you're going to get garbage insights out. It's a classic case of "garbage in, garbage out," but on a multi-billion dollar scale. ### How Kazimi Plans to Build a Trust Layer Founded in 2024 by August Joseph (CTO), Chase Gummer (CEO), Ville Mikkola (COO), and Andreas Naumann, Kazimi's tech focuses on securing an app's communication signals. Their goal is to let developers do three critical things: - Collect and verify their first-party data. - Detect all forms of non-human, bot activity. - Distinguish real users from fake users with privacy-preserving tech. They claim to use advanced cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs. In plain English, that means they can verify data is accurate and secure without actually seeing the sensitive data itself. It's a way to be both powerful and compliant with strict privacy rules. Their tech supports all the major mobile platforms, app frameworks, and business intelligence systems. And they're already working with clients in mobile gaming, rewards platforms, and FinTech—industries where fraud can be a death blow. ### The Big Vision for an AI-Driven World Jacek Lubinski, the lead investor from Market One Capital, sees an even bigger picture. "In the AI era, we believe Kazimi can become the fundamental security layer for the global app economy," he says. The vision is a world where apps can have secure, accurate data at a massive scale, all while preserving user privacy 100%. That's a tall order, but it speaks to the size of the opportunity. With this new capital, Kazimi plans to scale its solution to tackle the global mobile ad spend market. It's a market worth hundreds of billions, and a huge portion of it is potentially being wasted on interactions that aren't even human. It makes you wonder. How many of our own metrics are we taking at face value? How many decisions are based on data we simply assume is clean? Kazimi's funding is a bet that in the next few years, answering those questions won't be a luxury—it'll be a necessity for any app that wants to survive and thrive.