Cheetah Mobile, maker of popular apps like Piano Tiles and Clean Master, partnered with Kiip, a mobile rewards platform, in a move designed to “balance user experience with monetisation”.

Kiip told Mobile World Live it specialises in ‘moments marketing’, engaging consumers with relevant offers when they encounter a specific moment within an app, such as reaching a high score or achieving a fitness goal.

Cheetah now wants to “help this type of advertising reach a ‘greater scale’ by adopting it in its apps”, which attract 635 million monthly active users, while “engaging its presence in APAC to help expand the model with more brands regionally.”

The Kiip platform is being white-labelled as ‘Cheetah Moments’ and operations in Asia involving Cheetah’s apps will use that name.

Cheetah Mobile’s global business development team will help Kiip expand the size of its network by offering the Cheetah Moments SDK to publishers across the globe, predominantly in Asia Pacific.

“Both companies believe in creating amazing brand experiences that respect the consumer and we believe that the model to do that is through targeting moments. With Cheetah’s scale and Kiip’s moments technology, we believe we can change the mobile advertising landscape for the better.” said Brian Wong, co-founder and CEO of Kiip.

Cheetah Mobile claimed it is one of the top three mobile game developers in the world, with its game Piano Tiles 2 reaching the number ranking in more than 150 countries globally on both iOS and Android.

However, it mainly makes mobile security and utility apps like Clean Master, Battery Doctor and CM Security.

At the end of 2015, Cheetah had around 2.34 billion global installations and five of its products have entered the top 40 in Google Play’s global top app charts.

Kiip is supported by Verizon Ventures, Digital Garage, IPG and others, and has raised $24 million in funding to date.