Jest Games Fund Offers Studios Up to $1M Per Title for RCS Messaging Games

When Pocket Gems brought Episode to Jest's platform, it wasn't signing a traditional publishing deal. There was no equity on the table, no IP transfer, and no 30% cut disappearing into an app store. That arrangement is now the template for every studio that enters the Jest Games Fund, a staged investment program offering up to $1 million per title to developers building games for the RCS messaging ecosystem.

Jest emerged from stealth on February 26, 2026 with $7 million in seed funding led by Innovation Endeavors. The San Francisco company, founded by Deyan Vitanov, CEO and co-founder, is positioning itself as the first marketplace for messaging games, using SMS and RCS protocols as its distribution layer. RCS has already accelerated past 3.8 billion monthly active users globally.

The fund deploys capital across three tiers: $1 million for flagship titles, $200,000 for promising mid-stage titles, and $40,000 for exploratory projects. Jest characterizes these not as fixed tiers but as progression stages: most games enter at Explore to validate performance on the platform, while some studios may qualify directly for Scale based on product maturity and performance signals. Advancement to Flagship is driven entirely by results.

Each stage of the fund includes a user acquisition budget, onboarding services, and hands-on partner support through a dedicated Slack channel. Developers keep 90% of revenue on Jest, with the platform subsidizing 100% of messaging costs, compared to the 30%-plus fees and added distribution costs typical of app stores. Jest takes no equity and requires no IP transfers as conditions of participation, though studios that accept fund terms agree to an increased platform revenue share in line with Jest's published platform economics.

The fund also provides what Jest calls onboardings: "short, interactive experiences, similar to playable ads, adapted for messaging games on Jest," created by Jest's team to drive user acquisition for accepted titles. Existing games are eligible, not just new builds. Jest's SDK turns messaging into a simple API call, handling infrastructure, carrier integrations, compliance, and liability, and any studio with a mobile web build that integrates with that SDK can apply.

Early partners developing for the platform include Pocket Gems with Episode, Global Worldwide with Kingdom Maker, HayHay with Puppy Mansion, Nowwa with Super Snappy Go, HG Point with Piece of Cake, and Dominion Games with Opps. Partner titles have delivered 3-4x higher retention and 35-60% lower user acquisition costs than their mobile app versions across more than 1 million games played in beta.

The inaugural cohort closes April 15. Jest will use its seed funding to scale the platform and onboard the first wave of studios.

"As millions of mobile apps and games compete for new users amid a decline in app store downloads and soaring acquisition costs, it's increasingly clear that the app store business model is outdated. Messaging is the first open, global distribution channel to offer developers a fundamentally new distribution and engagement model," Vitanov said. For studios tired of competing in an over-saturated app store market, a text message inbox with 3.8 billion addressable users and a 90/10 revenue split is a hard pitch to ignore.