Kakao Games announced on Sept. 2 that it had made a strategic investment in BackendX, a South Korean company developing AI tools to automate backend development and operations. In its official announcement, the publisher said the investment would support early discovery of promising indie and small game studios and expand potential connections to future acquisitions and publishing deals.[1]
The investment’s intended uses cover developer discovery and support for existing partners: identifying prospects for future acquisitions or publishing deals, and offering BackendX services to small studios already under publishing contracts. Seoul Economic Daily reported that the company hoped to ease partners’ development and operating burden while improving their game development and service capabilities.[1][4]
According to Kakao Games, BackendX turns natural-language conversations into software blueprints, then uses a pipeline of approximately 50 AI agents to build, deploy and operate the backend. Moon Dae-kyung founded the business in July 2025 after serving as head of new technology development and a server team leader at Nexon Korea, and as chief executive of game server engine developer iFunFactory.[1][2]
Kakao Games said it valued BackendX’s potential to support service deployment and operations as the market for “vibe coding,” which enables people without professional development skills to create applications with AI, grows. Co-chief executive Kim Tae-hwan said the solution was easy for indie game developers worldwide to use and that the company sought broader use of AI across its operations.[1][3]
