Replai introduces AI for mobile game ads and raises $8M

Replai, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, has unveiled its tech for combining AI with mobile game advertising to make much more effective ads in a very short time. The company has also raised $8 million to date.

The AI from Replai aims to automate video creation for marketing purposes, promising effectiveness and speed in creating ads.

The company already operates a platform that processes over $5 billion of ad spend annually. With a focus on collaboration with major gaming companies globally, Replai’s technology now generates thousands of video ads each month. The company’s latest AI innovation stands out for its automatic video creation from data or text prompts, marking a milestone in gaming advertising.

“Replai AI creation is a natural step that follows from the video intelligence platform, expertise, and data models that we’ve invested in for years,” said CEO João Vieira da Costa. “We were surprised when we put the creation product in the hands of early adopters – the empowering effect is real and is supercharging professionals like we’ve never seen in over a decade of the industry. We saw prompts being made after midnight by creative and non-creative people”

He added, “We know the market is big, and many competitors will surely come. At Replai, we try to create an edge with the levels of data we already process into insights, together with a genuine love for helping the individuals we have the pleasure to call customers.”

It’s clearly part of the trend around using AI to enhance business processes, such as creating ads.

“The market is exploding,” said Da Costa. “More than a year ago, we started developing generative AI capabilities. And it wasn’t until then that we became capable of doing an entire video from scratch using AI.”

Da Costa said that the market is very responsive to what the company is doing, and the opportunity is big. Replai has about 30 people, with much of the product team in Portugal.

The hallmark of Replai’s AI breakthrough lies in its capability to fabricate videos based on a customer’s ad-network accounts and the game’s data. Using advanced computer vision, the AI deciphers in-game data, interprets tags, and dynamically produces real-time video creatives.

The company has transformed about $5 billion per year in ad spending into its data platform and it uses that information with its generative AI model to generate videos for customers on the fly. It can incorporate your existing videos and ads and generate its own ads as needed.

Humans can review the work but Replai can deliver the video ads directly to the clients’ ad networks.

“We receive the feedback in real time and can iterate the video automatically and make it live,” da Costa said. “The customer doesn’t have to touch it. What Replai was always able to do was to give you an insight that you should check data by the other sources. If changes are necessary, they can be implemented in a very short time, rather than a week or more with manual work.”

“Because this creates a feedback loop, we can then review it live. We can replay and analyze the elements, which are the facts that we use together with the metrics that can give us a way to bring a conclusion,” he said. “The AI generator creates a new video ad automatically. We think this is a very hot topic.”

Additionally, Replai automatically launches these videos within ad campaigns, gauges performance fatigue, and tailors creative variations for different ad networks. This approach, driven by Replai’s Learning Language Model (LLM), transforms video tags and metrics data into fresh and successful content.

Innovating further, Replai has introduced a distinctive text-to-video platform empowering user acquisition and creative teams to make AI-driven changes to existing videos or create entirely new ones. This platform, capable of mimicking competitors’ styles, offers a competitive edge in the market.

The technology’s potential to alter the marketing landscape for gaming companies globally was underlined by da Costa.

Da Costa started the company in 2019. And now Replai said it leads the frontier in creative insights within mobile gaming advertising. Replai’s AI-driven platform automatically generates marketing videos from ad-network data, product content, and text prompts.

With an emphasis on performance optimization leveraging advanced computer vision and AI models, Replai caters to global gaming brands, seeking to enhance growth and efficient marketing strategies. The company operates across San Francisco, London, and Porto, emphasizing innovation and customer-centric solutions.

“We have a few pilot customers on stealth that we’ve done this with and they are very big customers,” da Costa said. “They are already at the stage where it is very useful, sometimes generating hundreds of videos or even thousands of videos per month. It has been very intense.”