Liftoff Introduces Next Wave of Cortex™ Innovations Powering the Future of Mobile Advertising

Growing adoption reflects increasing demand for precision and scale in mobile advertising

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Liftoff, a global leader in performance marketing and monetization solutions for the mobile app economy, today announced a new wave of product innovations for Cortex, its proprietary neural network prediction engine that powers all bidding and performance decisions across its product suite. The advancements are driven by continued demand for Cortex across the market, as the need for greater precision, scale, and performance increases.

Cortex represents a new generation of machine learning built specifically for mobile advertisers. It transforms how advertisers acquire and engage users on mobile (the most-used screen today) by identifying patterns in historical behavioral and contextual signals in real time. Today, Cortex makes over two billion predictions per second, enabling smarter bidding decisions that optimize campaigns, ensure the right ad is served to the right user, and ultimately improve ROI for partners.

Since its initial rollout in late 2023, Liftoff has continued investing heavily in Cortex, expanding its data foundation, improving prediction accuracy, and accelerating product innovation to drive measurable performance gains for advertisers.

"Cortex fundamentally changes how advertisers compete by replacing static models with real-time, adaptive decisioning," said Andre Tutundjian, Chief Operating Officer at Liftoff. "It processes exponentially more data and runs continuous testing, so campaigns get smarter and more efficient with every impression. The result is better targeting, faster optimization, and stronger ROI at scale."

Prediction, Precision, and Performance

Building on Cortex's momentum, Liftoff is introducing several key innovations to enhance Cortex's predictive power and performance:

• Unattributed Samples for More Complete Learning – With the addition of unattributed samples, Cortex can now learn from conversions it did not directly drive. This expands the engine's training dataset and provides a more complete view of user intent, improving prediction accuracy across campaigns.
• Multicast Modeling for User-Level ROAS Optimization – Liftoff's multicast model for ROAS optimization marks a shift from aggregate predictions to individualized, user-level valuation, allowing advertisers to more efficiently identify high-value users and maximize return on ad spend with greater precision.
• Sequential Modeling for Deeper Behavioral Insight – Cortex now leverages raw sequential inputs, moving beyond summarized metrics to ingest full behavioral sequences, including timing, location, and app context of each user action, resulting in richer user profiles and a more dynamic, real-time understanding of intent.

These improvements, now available for Liftoff's Accelerate customers, have led to 41% growth in Liftoff's Core Advertising platform revenue due to improved performance delivered by Cortex, 4x higher experiment velocity, and the ability to optimize new campaigns in less than a day (compared to roughly two weeks without Cortex).

Rapid Adoption and Measurable Growth

In addition, since Cortex's launch, Liftoff has seen strong adoption across its platform, reflecting growing demand for more advanced, AI-driven performance solutions. This momentum is reflected in:

• 21% year-over-year growth in number of demand-side customers using Liftoff's platform to acquire new users in 2025
• An increase in supply-side footprint, with SDK-integrated apps reaching 167,000+ as of March 31, 2026
• Approximately 1.4 billion daily active users worldwide reached through Cortex SDK integrations in the first quarter of 2026

"Over the past year, we migrated many of our campaigns to Liftoff's next-generation AI-enabled platform, Cortex. The impact has been game-changing," said Simon Hales, Associate Director of Performance Marketing at King. "The new neural net models are able to find more high-value players. We saw players with better retention rates who became immersed in the gameplay and continued making purchases over time."

What's Next: Agentic Workflows

Looking ahead, Liftoff is focused on advancing agentic workflows to power the next phase of mobile advertising. Building on Cortex's real-time prediction engine, the company is developing autonomous systems that can continuously test, learn, and optimize entire campaign lifecycles, reducing manual intervention and accelerating performance gains.

These advancements will increase the pace of innovation in mobile, and unlock new levels of efficiency, precision, and performance for advertisers.

For more information about Cortex, visit: https://liftoff.ai/blog/cortex-ml-platform-announcement/.

About Liftoff

Liftoff is a leading growth and monetization engine built for the mobile app economy. Its AI-powered platform, Cortex™, unifies marketing, creative, and monetization to deliver measurable performance at scale across the app lifecycle. Liftoff enables advertisers to unlock profitable user growth while helping app publishers maximize revenue with advanced ad monetization technology. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, Liftoff supports a diverse, global customer base across gaming, consumer, and emerging app categories. 

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SOURCE Liftoff