A startup out of Turkey that has constructed successful informal cell sport the place it’s a must to discover cats in Where’s Wally-style drawings of accelerating complexity has now discovered one thing else: $18 million in funding. Agave Games, the creator of Find the Cat, will likely be utilizing the Series A to construct out its group and to work on future titles, beginning with a minimum of two extra within the subsequent 12 months.
The funding comes at a time when informal cell video games — phrase puzzles, bodily puzzles, quantity puzzles, farm-building, and the remaining — proceed to rake in large audiences and revenues. Find the Cat crossed 10 million downloads in its first quarter of life (it was solely launched in August). “It’s the subsequent Tripledot,” stated one investor, referring to the hit informal cell sport studio that has itself raised tons of cash at a giant valuation.
Felix Capital and Balderton Capital are co-leading this spherical, with E2VC taking part. All three companies have been already buyers: Balderton had additionally led Agave’s seed spherical, which occurred to have Akin Babayigit, co-founder of Tripledot Studios, as an investor.
Agave has now raised $25.5 million, and its post-money valuation is within the area of round $100 million.
Turkey is quick changing into residence to lots of the largest sport startups in a development began by Peak Games, which Zynga acquired for $1.8 billion in 2020. Peak’s alums then went on to kind Dream Games, which final raised $255 million, Tripledot, and Spyke, which raised $50 million earlier this 12 months (it had launched with $55 million in funding earlier than releasing even a single title).
Unlike the others, Agave is just a Peak offshoot within the oblique sense: CEO Alper Oner had moved to the U.S. to review laptop engineering at UC Berkeley, and he stayed within the Bay Area working and attempting to determine what he wished to deal with. “I knew I wished to be within the tech enterprise,” he stated. “But on the time, the Turkish ecosystem simply wasn’t very large.” Back then, Peak was rising quick, however past that, there was e-commerce and never an entire lot extra, he stated.
Then COVID-19 hit, and Oner determined to return residence, the place he got here collectively together with his highschool associates Ali Baran Terzioglu, Burak Kar and Oguzhan Merdivenli, and so they began speaking about what they may construct collectively.
They hit on informal video games partly due to their very own pursuits as players and partly as a result of they may see the way it may carry collectively what they understood and knew about tech.
It’s additionally a mark of simply how a lot tighter the system for making informal video games has change into: Agave had printed just one different sport earlier than Find the Cat, a puzzle sport referred to as Wonder Link. It’s a flop in comparison with their second attempt, with downloads within the a whole bunch of hundreds since its launch in July 2023. Compare that to the tales you hear of Rovio’s early days: it made 51 video games — all flops — earlier than lastly hitting the bonanza with Angry Birds.
Find the Cat may be very a lot a product of all that has come earlier than, in addition to what’s across the nook. Similar to different informal video games, it leans each into in-app purchases and in-app promoting (it makes use of AppLovin, like many others) to earn cash. On Android alone, it has now netted $10 million in revenues, per SensorTower estimates.
Oner stated the corporate makes use of AI quite a bit within the artistic course of: In the previous, the corporate would have had 5 – 6 artists engaged on a single display (one of many footage during which 20 or 30 cats are hidden). Now, he stated that the corporate is utilizing AI to make the preliminary footage, and people are then coming in to “polish it.”
The firm will not be utilizing AI for coding, he stated, as a result of nothing has confirmed to be as efficient as people on this entrance. But you’ll be able to think about how Agave would possibly construct extra AI-fueled personalization into the combo over time.
Polish appears to be the phrase of the second. Rob Moffat, the companion who led the funding for Balderton, stated he believes Agave has the potential to be a $100 million income firm, partly due to how sticky gameplay is up to now in Find the Cat, and partly due to different encouraging indicators.
“They’re constructing this actually robust group engaged on a bunch of attention-grabbing ideas, discovering these attention-grabbing mechanics for video games and making them into a very polished, enjoyable expertise. We are backing the potential they’ve constructed to have the ability to try this,” he stated.
