KGeN, the company building the world’s largest Verified Distribution Protocol across AI, DeFi, gaming, and consumer apps, has announced a new $13.5 million strategic round with participation from Jump Crypto, Accel, and Prosus Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to $43.5 million.
The raise follows a $20 million seed round in January 2023 and a $10 million ecosystem round in November 2024, as KGeN scales its protocol, commerce stack, and loyalty infrastructure across more than 60 countries. The company verifies real users and brings their engagement, commerce, and reputation on-chain—creating a bot-resistant distribution layer for builders, while allowing users to earn from their time, skill, and networks.
“KGeN solves the hardest problem in consumer growth: trust,” said Manish Agarwal, Elder Council at KGeN. “By verifying real users and turning reputation into an asset, we’re giving AI, DeFi, gaming companies and consumer apps a distribution rail that converts and scales.”
At the core of KGeN is POGE, a privacy-preserving identity and reputation framework that has already aggregated more than 876 million attributes from real user engagement and commerce. POGE powers biometric-anchored user acquisition, programmable on-chain loyalty, and decentralized commerce through K-Store—giving apps the tools to activate high-value users and drive measurable outcomes.
“We built KGeN to be partner-first and protocol-driven: verifiable users in, measurable outcomes out,” said Ishank Gupta, Elder Council at KGeN. “With POGE as the reputation backbone, partners can acquire, retain, and reward the right users while letting those users carry value across the open internet.”
Since launch, KGeN has built a verified distribution network of 38.9 million protocol users, 6.14 million monthly active users, and 780,000 daily active users, supported by more than 200 revenue partnerships. Annualised revenue has reached $48.3 million, with a 95-person team operating across multiple regions.
Backers cited KGeN’s ability to deliver on-chain proof, verified engagement, and real revenue across AI and DeFi use cases as core to their investment thesis.
