A startup out of Turkey that has constructed successful informal cell sport the place you need to discover cats in The place’s Wally-style drawings of accelerating complexity has now discovered one thing else: $18 million in funding. Agave Video games, the creator of Discover the Cat, will likely be utilizing the Sequence A to construct out its group and to work on future titles, beginning with at the least 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 remainder — proceed to rake in enormous audiences and revenues. Discover 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 collaborating. All three corporations have been already traders: 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 turning into house to a number of the largest sport startups in a pattern began by Peak Video games, which Zynga acquired for $1.8 billion in 2020. Peak’s alums then went on to type Dream Video 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).
Not like the others, Agave is barely 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 Space working and making an attempt to determine what he needed to deal with. “I knew I needed to be within the tech enterprise,” he stated. “However on the time, the Turkish ecosystem simply wasn’t very huge.” Again 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 house, the place he got here collectively along 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 avid gamers and partly as a result of they may see the way it might convey collectively what they understood and knew about tech.
It’s additionally a mark of simply how a lot tighter the formulation for making informal video games has turn into: Agave had revealed just one different sport earlier than Discover the Cat, a puzzle sport known as Surprise Hyperlink. 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. Examine 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 Indignant Birds.
Discover the Cat may be very a lot a product of all that has come earlier than, in addition to what’s across the nook. Much like 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 money. On Android alone, it has now netted $10 million in revenues, per SensorTower estimates.
Oner stated the corporate makes use of AI loads within the inventive course of: Previously, the corporate would have had 5 or 6 artists engaged on a single display screen (one of many footage by 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 corporate isn’t utilizing AI for coding, he stated, as a result of nothing has confirmed to be as efficient as people on this entrance. However you may think about how Agave may construct extra AI-fueled personalization into the combination over time.
Polish appears to be the phrase of the second. Rob Moffat, the accomplice 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 thus far in Discover the Cat, and partly due to different encouraging alerts.
“They’re constructing this actually sturdy group engaged on a bunch of fascinating ideas, discovering these fascinating mechanics for video games and making them into a very polished, enjoyable expertise. We’re backing the aptitude they’ve constructed to have the ability to do this,” he stated.
