Reforged Labs has announced their $3.9M seed round, led by global venture capital firm DCM, with participation from Y Combinator, Epakon Capital, Goodwater Capital, Phoenix Fund, Asymmetry Ventures, and angel investors, including executives from Niantic and Pocket Gems, and the founders behind King and Sky Mavis.
Reforged Labs’ focus is on video ads, which dominate user acquisition across every game category and ad platform. They are indispensable and effective when done right, but they also present constant hurdles – in the form of ad fatigue, increasing costs, and complexities in managing experiments.
“Player acquisition is the lifeblood of any game – and the most important challenge for game studios. Mastering marketing has long been difficult, unpredictable, and the single largest expense for game developers. We built Reforged Labs to tackle that challenge.”
Robert Huynh, Co-founder and CEO of Reforged Labs
Reforged Labs has been working with a dozen partners to pilot their AI ad platform, ranging from AAA studios to first time game developers. They have seen consistent results and positive responses from their pilot customers.
“It used to take days or weeks to get a high-quality video ad to promote a new game, but Reforged Labs’ platform helped us create new video ads in minutes.”
Binh Nguyen, Lead Designer at IMBA Games
Reforged Labs aims to extend this technology to more game companies and grow it into a solution that can act as an accelerator in the marketing cycle.
“Reforged Labs stands out in the AI space by going narrow but deep. By being laser-focused on building AI models for game marketing, they help game studios master ad performance far faster. The games industry is primed for AI innovation, and Reforged Labs has the right team and technology to lead that charge.”
Hurst Lin, Founding Partner of DCM
The company plans a platform that will automatically analyze top ad attributes across genres, generate competitor insights and benchmarks, and integrate the latest best practices. This will allow game marketers to experiment with video ads affordably and at scale.
“The technology that Reforged Labs is building will make it much easier for game studios of all sizes to experiment with video ads and achieve better, more consistent UA performance at scale.”
Other players try to address the individual factors that make game marketing successful – the creative, analytics, or performance management pieces. But Reforged Labs has the ambition and unique ability to deliver a solution that improves on the entire marketing cycle.”
Sebastian Knutsson, Co-Founder of King
About DCM
DCM is a venture capital firm with over $4 billion under management. Since 1996, they have invested in more than 400 technology companies across the U.S. and Asia. With offices in Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Tokyo, DCM empowers their entrepreneurs with hands-on operational guidance and a global network of business and financial resources.
