Susan
Kuo

Profile

The Architect of Mobile Attribution

Before "mobile measurement partner" was a job category, Susan Kuo was already doing the job. She had survived the gaming gold rush at Electronic Arts, navigated the chaotic early days of mobile advertising at InMobi, and bet her career on a scrappy Israeli startup called Onavo as its second American hire. When Facebook bought Onavo in 2013, most people would have cashed out and settled in. Susan Kuo started building.

The company she co-founded with Gadi Eliashiv and Eran Friedman - three ex-Onavo executives with an obsession about fragmented marketing data - became Singular. Today it is one of the primary platforms through which performance marketers at Lyft, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Rovio understand what their ad dollars are actually doing.

Starting in the Room Where It Wasn't Obvious

Susan's career did not begin in ad tech. It began in games. Electronic Arts in the early 2000s was not the obvious on-ramp to becoming a marketing intelligence pioneer, but that is where Susan learned to sell into a complex, fast-moving ecosystem - and fell in love with the intersection of technology and entertainment.

From EA she moved through a sequence of companies that read like a field guide to the early internet economy: Gaia Online, where user-generated identity first went mainstream; Booyah, a location-based gaming startup that was early to mobile; Digital Impact, an email and digital marketing platform acquired by Acxiom. Each stop added a layer to a body of knowledge that most of her contemporaries wouldn't have until much later.

Then came InMobi - the Bangalore-based mobile advertising network that was scaling globally when mobile advertising was still mostly guesswork. Susan ran marketing there, learning the mechanics of mobile ad spend at a time when the data infrastructure barely existed.

Onavo: Building a Go-To-Market from Nothing

When Susan joined Onavo, the Israeli data analytics company was an idea with a US ambition and almost no US footprint. She was employee number two on American soil, which meant inventing everything: the sales motion, the partner relationships, the market narrative. The fact that she did it well enough that Facebook came calling is the résumé line most people remember.

What is less discussed is the decision she made when the acquisition was announced. Rather than fold into one of the world's most powerful technology companies, Kuo - along with Eliashiv and Friedman - chose to leave and start over. They had seen firsthand what marketers were struggling with: data was everywhere, but insights were nowhere. Every ad network had its own dashboard. Attribution was a mess. Analytics and campaign management sat in separate silos that barely talked to each other.

The problem was not abstract. They had lived it from the inside.

Singular: Turning Fragmented Data into a Single Source of Truth

Singular launched in 2014 with a $5M seed round and a thesis that was both obvious in retrospect and genuinely radical at the time: marketers needed a single platform that unified attribution data with cost aggregation and analytics. Not a point solution for attribution. Not a reporting tool. A unified intelligence layer.

The early clients were mobile gaming companies - Kabam, GREE, Big Fish Games - the vertical that Susan knew best and that had the most acute version of the problem. Gaming marketers were running campaigns across dozens of networks simultaneously, trying to calculate ROI across incompatible datasets. Singular gave them one view.

The platform scaled. By the Series B in 2018 - a $30M round - Singular was serving clients across verticals, including travel (HotelTonight), ride-sharing (Lyft), and enterprise software (Microsoft). Susan oversaw global partnerships throughout this growth, the function that determines which integrations get built and which media networks get priority.

Privacy, Attribution, and the IDFA Earthquake

When Apple announced its App Tracking Transparency framework in 2020 - effectively killing the IDFA as a universal mobile identifier - it sent shockwaves through the entire performance marketing industry. Mobile measurement partners like Singular were at the center of the disruption, because their core function depended on connecting ad exposures to app installs across devices.

Susan's read on the situation was clear-eyed. "There's definitely a primary reason, which is very much focused around user privacy," she said in a 2023 podcast appearance on Remerge. She noted that privacy concerns were not Apple-specific - every major media platform was grappling with the same question. Her assessment of industry readiness was measured but optimistic: most of the top 25 media partners were on track.

This was Singular's moment to demonstrate value not just as a data aggregator, but as a trusted navigator through regulatory complexity - and Susan's relationships across the partnership ecosystem became central to that positioning.

THRIVE: The Community She Built Because None Existed

Five years into building Singular, Susan Kuo noticed something about the rooms she was in. She was frequently the only woman at the table. Not just at her own company - across the mobile marketing industry, female executives at the decision-making level were rare enough that when Susan wanted peer advice, she often couldn't find anyone who had faced the same situation.

In 2019, she did something about it. She founded THRIVE, a community platform specifically for women in growth marketing and tech. The mission was specific: not just networking, not just inspiration content, but genuine knowledge-sharing and mentorship among female executives navigating the same industry.

"Any successful business or venture in life starts first with drawing inspiration and establishing friendships with people in your community," she said at the launch. THRIVE was the infrastructure for that community in an industry where it hadn't existed at scale.

Recognized - and Still Running

In January 2020, Mobile World Congress nominated Susan for the Global Mobile Award in the Women4Tech category - the industry's acknowledgment of her dual role as a platform builder and an industry advocate. The same year, The Software Report named her to its Top 50 Women Leaders in SaaS list.

Recognition is a snapshot. The more useful picture is the one in motion: Susan Kuo still running global partnerships at Singular, still sitting on advisory boards for mobile startups, still fielding questions from performance marketers about what SKAdNetwork actually means for their attribution models.

She is, by the definition that matters most, still at the table. And she is actively working to make sure more women are seated there too.

On Not Seeing the Ceiling

One of the recurring themes in Susan Kuo's public comments is the self-limiting nature of perceived boundaries. Her advice to others - women especially, but not exclusively - is to interrogate whether the barriers they see are structural or self-imposed. Often, she argues, the act of naming a boundary is what makes it real.

This is not a motivational-poster sentiment. It is a philosophy that has actually governed her career decisions. She left a stable role at a Facebook-acquired company to found a startup in a crowded space. She launched a women's community before anyone had validated there was demand. She built a go-to-market function from scratch at a company with no US presence.

None of those moves were obvious at the time. Most of them worked. The pattern is consistent enough that it deserves to be taken at face value: Susan Kuo does not see the ceiling, and she is suspicious of people who say they do.