Reforged Labs pivots again with AI tool for video game marketers

Reforged Labs’ co-founders: Oscar Xing Luo (left) and Robert Huynh (right) / Photo credit: Reforged Labs

Reforged Labs has launched Boa, an AI research tool for mobile game marketers. This marks the second pivot for the startup since its founding in September 2023.

Reforged Labs, which is headquartered in San Francisco and has engineering teams in Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City, initially aimed to help game studios develop in-game content using generative AI. However, it shifted to generating video ads for mobile games when it closed a US$3.9 million seed round in August 2024.

With Boa, Reforged Labs’ AI system no longer generates video content, co-founder and CEO Robert Huynh tells Tech in Asia. Instead, it produces “creative briefs” game marketers can use in ad campaign creation. The goal is to improve return on ad spend – a common metric used to measure the gross revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising.

Boa scans and analyzes gaming video ads across various ad networks, identifying key insights into what drives these ads’ performance.

Huynh says the AI tool is trained on proprietary data sets developed and maintained by the company’s in-house data annotation team. This gives Boa a deeper understanding of what’s happening in the video ads.

Rather than fine-tuning its own AI model, Reforged Labs relies on API access to multiple large language models, including Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro. This approach allows the company to use the “latest and greatest models” for different use cases, according to Huynh.

He believes that by taking this new direction, Reforged Labs can address the real pain point in mobile game marketing.

The team took a step back from video generation because the tools it requires are now widely available. Moreover, human-led creative production remains cheap in markets like China and Vietnam, which means teams can easily make their own videos.

“The bottleneck is: Is there a new trend in South Korea that might resonate with my audience in the US?” Huynh points out. “Or is there a trend that’s happening in another genre that might be applicable for my sub-segment?”

Boa allows mobile game marketers to get insights into effective ad campaigns / Image credit: Reforged Labs

As to why Reforged Labs focuses on mobile games, he says it’s because the market depends heavily on paid user acquisition, thereby making advertising a core strategy for developers.

The company charges a subscription fee starting US$250 per month for Boa, with custom pricing for studios looking to integrate past ad performance data into the AI tool to optimize future campaigns.