Deals · Cybersecurity

Berlin's Kazimi raises €2.2M pre-Seed to help app developers verify human traffic using zero-knowledge proofs

A Berlin-based mobile security company that uses cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs to help app developers verify that signals in their apps come from real human users rather than automated bots.

ProYarn Desk · August 24, 2026Read this in French

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“Until now it has been technically impossible for app developers to have true visibility on which signals originate from real users and which signals come from bots. With our advanced security solution, we are closing the loop and enabling app developers to protect their most important resource – their first party data.”

Andreas Naumann — Co-founder and CPO, Kazimi

Kazimi (Berlin) has raised €2.2 million in an oversubscribed pre-Seed round led by Market One Capital, with IBB Ventures and three angel investors participating: Petri Hyökyranta (former CTO of Rovio), Janne Peltola (former data scientist at Supercell), and Erik Massmann (former CFO of Birkenstock Group and Sportradar AG). The company was founded in 2024 by Chase Gummer (CEO), August Joseph (CTO), Ville Mikkola (COO), and Andreas Naumann (CPO).

The starting point is a Cloudflare statistic the company cites in its announcement: in 2026, automated bots officially eclipsed human internet traffic for the first time. The implications vary by context — in advertising attribution and gaming monetisation, the gap between bot-generated signals and real human intent is not an abstract measurement problem. It is a billing problem.

Zero-knowledge proof for first-party data

Kazimi's approach is to attack the bot problem at the signal layer inside mobile apps, using cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). The mechanism: when an event fires inside an app — a purchase, an ad click, a session start — Kazimi's SDK cryptographically attests that the signal originated from a verified human rather than an automated script, without transmitting any additional personal data in the process.

The GDPR angle is not incidental. Several existing anti-fraud approaches in mobile — device fingerprinting, behavioural biometrics, session replay — have attracted regulatory attention in European markets because they involve collecting and processing personal data beyond what the user explicitly consented to. A verification layer that operates at the cryptographic proof level, confirming humanity without examining the person, is designed to avoid that class of compliance risk.

The target buyers are gaming studios and fintech applications: both have specific, quantifiable reasons to care whether in-app signals come from real users. A gaming studio with in-app purchases needs to know its monetisation data isn't inflated by bot farms gaming reward loops. A fintech app needs to know that transaction signals reflect genuine user intent, not scripted fraud.

The gaming and fintech focus

The angel roster signals where Kazimi expects its first commercial traction. Hyökyranta (ex-Rovio CTO) and Peltola (ex-Supercell data scientist) bring direct operational knowledge of large mobile gaming studios — companies that have managed bot and fraud problems at scale across millions of daily active users. That these individuals are writing personal cheques into a pre-Seed mobile security company suggests the problem is real and the existing solutions are insufficient.

IBB Ventures, the Berlin-state-backed fund, is a consistent early-stage participant in German deep-tech startups going for global markets. Market One Capital — a US-facing fund — positions the company for a bilateral go-to-market: European engineering credibility, US advertising-market scale.

Why it matters to investors

Cloudflare's 2026 report that bots officially eclipsed human internet traffic is the backdrop, not the thesis. For gaming studios with in-app purchase economies and for fintech apps with fraud liability, bot-polluted first-party data is not an analytics problem — it is a revenue and compliance problem. Kazimi's zero-knowledge proof approach is differentiated in a specific way: it verifies signal origin without collecting additional personal data, which makes it GDPR-compatible by design in a market where alternative anti-fraud approaches have drawn regulatory scrutiny. The Market One Capital and IBB Ventures combination signals a dual US/European market play — plausible for a Berlin company going after global mobile advertising budgets. The angel roster is operationally legible: ex-Rovio CTO and ex-Supercell data scientist bring direct knowledge of gaming studios, where the bot problem and its revenue impact are clearest. The risk is platform consolidation: Apple's App Transparency Framework and Google's Privacy Sandbox are both moving toward native signal-integrity verification, and platform-level solutions could subsume Kazimi's value proposition before it reaches enterprise scale. The 18-month question is whether the ZKP layer is defensibly proprietary enough — or deployed at enough customers — to survive a platform-level response from Apple or Google.

Sources

Pre-Seed Cybersecurity Germany Market One Capital IBB Ventures Petri Hyökyranta Janne Peltola Erik Massmann

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RegTech / AI governance · September 9, 2026

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