Gaming startups, especially those developing casual mobile games, are currently very popular in Turkey, and today another startup announced a major round after just nine months of being founded.
Grand Games, the publisher behind Magic Sort and Car Match, has raised $30 million in funding. This funding will be used to repeat the pattern we set to create the first two titles. That means we plan to hire more people and set up in smaller clusters. Take responsibility for your own game development
Bekir Batuhan Çelebi (AKA Batu), CEO and co-founder of Grand Games, says his company uses AI technology to speed up development, but it's important to motivate teams and have the freedom to execute on ideas. He said the company's concept of giving people a 20% discount is modeled after Supercell. The Finnish casual gaming giant — makes technology work.
“It all depends on the team culture we are building,” Batu said in an interview.
London-based Balderton is leading the Series A, along with previous backers Bek Ventures (formerly Earlybird Digital East) and Laton Ventures (which led a $3 million seed round last year), as well as angel investors. Mert Gul was also in attendance.
Grand Games did not disclose its valuation, but provided some general background: Sources say this round is oversubscribed and investors are vying to participate. The funding is one of the larger Series A rounds for a gaming startup in the country. And, notably, less than a month later, Agave Games announced an $18 million Series A (also co-led by Balderton) at a valuation of about $100 million.
One of Grand Games' titles, Magic Sort, has broken into Apple's best-selling casual games chart, with the two titles generating a combined total of over $4 million in app revenue in the first six months of publication. says the company.
The fact that Grand Games is raising any money makes it somewhat of an outlier in its category.
Because so many casual game startups are profitable early on and are often built on modest cost bases compared to larger games, such companies (or sole proprietor developers) ) tend to keep a low profile when it comes to fundraising.
Instead, they choose bootstrap. The current chart of the most popular casual and puzzle games on Apple's App Store has only a handful of venture-backed games. That list includes Dream Games and Supercell.
Dream Games, which raised $255 million in 2022, is the key name here. The company, which also originated in Turkey, is one of a group of companies that grew out of the success of Peak Games, which Zynga acquired for $1.8 billion in 2020. Peak and Dream set the standard for other founders in terms of business growth, with an ecosystem that includes Tripledot, Spyke (which raised $50 million last year and launched with $55 million), Agave, and Good Job. etc.
Good Job is where the three founders of Grand Games got their start. Batu, Mustafa Frutina and Mehmet Çalm were working there together when they came up with the idea to build the grand, Batu said.
As Batu explains, in the Turkish gaming world, game design decisions are usually made by the founders. They may be smart and ambitious, but their approach leaves much to be desired. The company's employees, “really talented and talented people,” had little permission to do the work they were doing, he said.
Grand's bet is that if he can create a structure where smart people can take over most of the decision-making within a cluster for a single title, productivity will increase, games will improve, and ultimately employees will It was said to improve happiness.
The culture Grand is introducing is the “biggest divide” among gaming companies in Istanbul, Batu said.
“By the way, it's not unheard of. Supercell has been doing this for over 10 years, but I don't think it's seen in the Turkish gaming industry,” he added.
Grand also relies heavily on AI tools to take care of some of the time-consuming work involved in coming up with artwork ideas and code, giving the team more time to be creative.
“I only intervene in 5% to 10% of the decisions they're making,” Batu said, referring to Grand's two clusters. These interventions might mean stepping in when there are fundamental disagreements that cannot be resolved, or spending time on projects that are not working.
Given that the company has been around for less than a year, there haven't been many challenges to its structure so far. It's only worked in two games so far, but they both work very well. (Cue the investor knocking down the door.)
The big question is whether Grand Game can maintain its track record as it hires more staff and establishes more production clusters. Investors want to bet that this is likely to happen.
“Istanbul is home to some of the world's best game studios, and within that ecosystem, the founders of Grand Games create world-class, genre-defining casual games that players love to play. ” said Suranga Chandratillake, general partner at Balderton. Capital said in a statement: “The speed at which they have built a great team culture and achieved success in the first two games shows their talent and dedication. We are proud of their extremely high ambition and passion for the game. I'm excited to be working with such a team.”