LvlUp Ventures backs Gameball’s push into AI-driven retail loyalty

What’s the deal? US-based LvlUp VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has joined the pre-Series A round of GameballDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a customer loyalty and automated growth platform. The investment was made through the firm’s newly established MENA Global Investment Hub in Dubai.

What does Gameball do? The platform helps brands retain customers and now serves more than 3,000 brands across over 70 countries.

What’s the endgame? Gameball is moving beyond traditional loyalty programmes towards an AI-powered system that automates customer retention and revenue growth. Its AI agents sit on top of a brand’s existing commerce and marketing stack, analysing transactions in real time and deploying rewards, messages and gamified workflows without manual input.

Why now? LvlUp Ventures said rising customer acquisition costs have made retention a critical growth lever for consumer brands, while merchants continue to juggle separate loyalty, email, SMS and gamification tools.

Gameball aims to address that fragmentation by acting as an intelligent orchestration layer. It ranks potential actions by financial impact and autonomously deploys engagement campaigns, using the results to sharpen its predictive models over time.

Why the region matters: LvlUp Ventures pointed to the expansion of e-commerce and quick-commerce markets across the Middle East and North Africa as a growing strategic market for technology and investment.

The signal: The investment reflects a broader shift towards AI-native platforms that turn fragmented customer data into automated, revenue-generating systems.

Read more: Egypt Innovate

Image credit: Generated with Gemini