Gaming startups, specifically those building casual mobile games, are very hot in Turkey right now, and today, another one is announcing a sizable round just nine months into its existence.
Grand Games, the publisher behind Magic Sort and Car Match, has picked up $30 million in funding — money that it will use to repeat the pattern it set up to create its first two titles: hire more talent who it will set up in small clusters to take ownership of developing their own games
Bekir Batuhan Çelebi (A.K.A. Batu), the CEO and co-founder of Grand Games, said while his company uses AI tech to speed up development, its concept of motivating its teams and giving them freedom to execute on ideas — modelled on Supercell, the casual gaming behemoth from Finland — makes the tech work as well as it does.
“It’s all about the team culture we are building,” Batu said in an interview.
London-based Balderdon is leading this Series A, which also had participation from previous backers Bek Ventures (formerly Earlybird Digital East) and Laton Ventures (which led a $3 million seed round last year), as well as angel investor Mert Gür.
Grand Games is not disclosing its valuation, but for some general context: We heard from sources that the round was oversubscribed and investors were competing to get in; the funding is one of the more sizeable Series A rounds for a gaming startup from the country; and notably, less than a month ago, Agave Games announced an $18 million Series A (which Balderton also co-led) at a valuation of around $100 million.
One of Grand Games’ titles, Magic Sort, has broken into Apple’s top-selling casual gaming charts, and its two titles have together pulled in more than $4 million in gross app revenues in the six months since they were published, the company said.
The fact that Grand Games is raising any money at all makes it somewhat of an outlier in its category.
Because so many casual gaming startups generate revenue early on, and they are often built on modest cost bases compared to larger games, many such companies (or sole-trader developers) tend to stay off the radar when it comes to funding.
Instead, they opt to bootstrap. In the current charts for most popular casual and puzzle games on Apple’s App Store, only a handful are venture-backed. That list includes Dream Games and Supercell.
Dream Games, which raised $255 million in 2022, is a key name here. It also hails from Turkey and is one of a cluster of companies that have grown out of the success of Peak Games, which Zynga acquired in 2020 for $1.8 billion. Peak and Dream have set the bar for other founders in terms of business growth, and others in the ecosystem include Tripledot, Spyke (raised $50 million last year, and launched with $55 million), Agave and Good Job.
Good Job is where the three founders of Grand Games got their start. Batu, Mustafa Fırtına and Mehmet Çalım were working together there when they came up with the idea of building Grand, Batu said.
As Batu describes it, typically in the Turkish gaming world, game design decisions are made by founders. They might be smart and ambitious, but that approach left a lot on the table. “Really capable, high caliber people” — their employees — had very little license in what they were working on, he said.
Grand’s bet was that if they could build a structure in which smart people could take on most of the decision-making in clusters around single titles, it would result in more productivity, better games and, ultimately, happier employees.
The culture Grand is trying to implement, Batu said, has become its “biggest separator” among gaming companies in Istanbul.
“It is not unheard of, by the way. Supercell has been doing it for more than 10 years, but I don’t think it is seen in the Turkish gaming industry,” he added.
Grand also leans heavily on AI tools for some of the time-consuming work involved in artwork ideas and writing code to give its teams more time to be creative.
“I only intervene in 5% to 10% of the decisions they are making,” Batu said, referring to the two clusters at Grand. Those interventions might be to step in if there are fundamental disagreements that cannot be resolved, or might be to call time on a project that just hasn’t worked.
So far, given that the company is less than a year old, it hasn’t had many challenges to its structure. It’s only worked on two games, and both are doing very well. (Cue investors knocking down its door.)
The big question is whether Grand Games can sustain its track record as it brings on more staff and sets up more of these production clusters. Investors are willing to bet that there is a good chance it will.
“Istanbul is producing some of the world’s finest gaming studios and within that ecosystem the founders of Grand Games stood out with their vision to create world-class genre-defining casual games that players love to play,” said Suranga Chandratillake, general partner at Balderton Capital, in a statement. “The speed with which they have built a brilliant team culture and achieved success with their first two games demonstrates their talent and commitment. We are excited to be working with a team with sky-high ambition and passion for gaming.”