January 29, 2026

The Capital Stack

Welcome the Capital Stack! A decade after founding Pollen VC and having lent hundreds of millions of dollars into the sector, I’ve seen the same question surface again and again across mobile gaming and app studios: “If our UA machine is working — where can we find the capital to...

Author
Martin Macmillan
CEO and Founder, Pollen VC
February 26, 2025

Discover what you’re REALLY paying for debt financing

Debt and revenue based finance options for early/growth stage businesses has become much more mainstream over the last few years, as founders seek alternative sources of capital to fund their growth. Rather than relying purely on equity financing which is dilutive to their ownership positions, they are increasingly seeking more...

Author
Martin Macmillan
CEO and Founder, Pollen VC
February 25, 2025

The Definitive Guide to Selecting a Mobile Financing Partner

The market for new ways to fund mobile user acquisition is exploding. But there is still a lot of confusion among publishers about the different financial products and how to understand the pros and cons of each of them. We created this definitive guide to funding mobile user acquisition to...

Author
Martin Macmillan
CEO and Founder, Pollen VC
January 15, 2025

Half-Life: A Crucial Metric for Mobile Game Success

In the fiercely competitive mobile gaming landscape, marketers are constantly seeking strategies to better understand their metrics and enhance their chances of success. A critical, yet often overlooked, aspect of this is the concept of duration. In an environment where ROI positive user acquisition is hard to achieve, understanding not...

Author
Martin Macmillan
CEO and Founder, Pollen VC
October 23, 2024

Rounding Up the Zombie Games

Until ad networks raise their game and figure out how to use the financial information widely available to them to evaluate credit risk in a much more dynamic way, structural their inefficiencies in the ecosystem will continue to persist. This hurts not only their own ads business, but also curtails...

Author
Martin Macmillan
CEO and Founder, Pollen VC