The mobile measurement partner that hands developers a data warehouse instead of a sales call.
Not because the game is broken - the game is fine. The problem is the ledger. Ad spend went out across six networks in a dozen countries; revenue trickled back in a different currency, on a different clock, in a different file format. Somewhere in that mess is the only question that matters: did today make money? For most of the last decade, answering it meant a marketer at midnight, a wall of spreadsheets, and a slowly cooling cup of coffee. Tenjin was built to turn that light off and send the person to bed.
Founded in 2014 and shaped inside Y Combinator's Summer batch, Tenjin is a mobile measurement partner - an MMP, in the trade's shorthand. That means it is the neutral referee standing between an app and the advertising networks it buys from, counting installs, attributing revenue, and telling the marketer which channel actually worked. Plenty of companies do this. What sets Tenjin apart is a stubborn conviction about who the customer really is: not a Fortune 500 procurement team, but a person the founders call the marketing scientist - someone who would rather read their own data than be handed a summary of it.
Christopher Farm - CEO - took an unusually winding road to a data company: mechanical engineering and management at MIT, investment banking at Deutsche Bank, then Microsoft's M&A division, then product roles at Tapjoy and Playnomics. It reads like a man collecting exactly the ingredients for a marketing-infrastructure startup without quite admitting he was cooking.
Amir Manji - CTO - came from Tapjoy too, and handles the engineering that makes the numbers trustworthy. His official Y Combinator title is, cheerfully, "Head Barista." It is the kind of joke that only lands when the serious work is already handled.
Their shared observation, watching mobile advertising mature at Tapjoy, was that two once-separate crafts were quietly merging. Marketing was becoming a data problem. Data science was becoming a marketing tool. The people who would win were the ones fluent in both - and those people needed instruments, not opinions. So Farm and Manji built the instruments.
Most measurement platforms sell their features à la carte, each module a separate line item and a separate negotiation. Tenjin refuses the game. Every tier - including the free one - ships the full suite. Here is what is inside the box.
Install attribution and in-app event tracking through the Tenjin SDK - which users, which channels, which creative actually drove growth.
The signature move: a marketing data warehouse you query directly, consolidating network revenue and cost down to the individual user.
Tracks hybrid monetization - purchases plus ads - using impression-level revenue feeds (ILRD/ULRD) from the mediation platforms.
Forecasts lifetime value early, so acquisition bids are placed on where a cohort is heading, not just where it started.
Aggregates spend across countries and platforms and unifies it with revenue into a single return-on-ad-spend view.
Real-time fraud detection plus a Site ID Optimization API that automatically blocks bad site IDs - billed as an industry first.
Campaign-scaling automation and hands-off ETL that pushes clean data into your own BI stack.
Full SKAN conversion-value reporting - given away free, to everyone, including the tier that pays nothing.
FIELD NOTE: The free tier covers 2,000 conversions a month with the entire feature set attached. It is generosity, but it is also strategy - a developer who learns the tool while small tends to stay when they grow.
In an industry that runs on contracts, demos and "let's get you on a call," Tenjin does something almost rude: it prints the price. Plans are month-to-month, cancel anytime, and the same suite ships at every rung. The numbers below are illustrative of the published, all-inclusive structure - the point is less the exact figure than the fact that you can see it at all.
The result is a company that behaves like a product, not a vendor. You can sign up, wire in an SDK, and get answers before anyone at Tenjin knows your name. For a solo developer or a five-person studio, that difference is the entire relationship.
Tenjin cut its teeth on hyper-casual games - the free, disposable, wildly high-volume titles where margins are measured in fractions of a cent and a wrong bid can bleed a budget overnight. Those studios needed exactly what Tenjin sold: cheap, precise, fast. Early users included names like Yelp, NaturalMotion, Playdots, N3TWORK and KLab; the public case studies read like a highlight reel.
All figures are the companies' own reported results, published as case studies - read them as claims with receipts, not audited fact.
Farm and Manji leave the mobile-ad world to build measurement infrastructure of their own.
The product goes live; within a year it is processing hundreds of millions of events a month.
With backing from Y Combinator, Lightbank and a roster of angels, Tenjin expands its marketing infrastructure.
Tenjin starts publishing recurring hyper-casual CPI and retention reports that become an industry reference.
A joint product pairs Tenjin's measurement with GameAnalytics' in-game analytics.
Official Meta partner status, a first-of-its-kind fraud-blocking API, and Apple Search Ads view-through support - a decade in, still shipping.
Tenjin is a small team - somewhere in the 30-to-35 range - working remote-first from wherever they happen to be, with a culture that leans on trust rather than supervision. It carries the compliance credentials the enterprise checklist demands (ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, CCPA) without losing the scrappiness that made it useful to a solo developer in the first place.
Its integrations read like a map of the mobile-ad universe: an official Meta MMP with AEM view-through support, Apple's SKAdNetwork and Search Ads, Google Ads conversion measurement, TikTok's dedicated campaigns, and impression-level revenue from AppLovin MAX and Unity LevelPlay. Where the giants - AppsFlyer, Adjust, Singular, Kochava - chase the enterprise, Tenjin keeps courting the person who reads their own SQL.
The studio is still there. But the wall of spreadsheets is gone, and so is the marketer's all-nighter. The question - did today make money? - now has an address: a query box, a dashboard, a number that already accounts for six networks and a dozen currencies. The coffee has gone cold because nobody needed it. The light is off. That is the whole promise Tenjin has been keeping for ten years, compressed into two words it prints on its own homepage: growth made simple.
It is not the loudest company in mobile marketing, and it is not trying to be. It is the one that decided the smartest customer was a scientist, handed them the raw data, and got out of the way. In an industry addicted to the black box, that is a genuinely contrarian bet - and a decade of thirty-thousand apps suggests it was the right one.