A startup from Türkiye that has created a successful casual mobile game in which you have to find cats. Where’s Wally?-drawings of increasingly complex style has now found something else: 18 million dollars in financing. agave gamesthe creator of Find the Cat, will use Series A to build his team and work on future titles, starting with at least two more next year.
The funding comes at a time when casual mobile games – word puzzles, physical puzzles, number puzzles, farm building and the rest – continue to generate huge audiences and revenue. Find the Cat surpassed 10 million downloads in its first quarter of life (it was only released in August). “It’s the next Tripledot,” said one investor, referring to the successful mobile casual game studio that has raised tons of money at a huge valuation.
Felix Capital and Balderton Capital are co-leading this round, with participation from E2VC. All three companies were already investors: Balderton had also led the Agave seed round, which coincidentally had Akin Babayigit, co-founder of Tripledot Studios, as an investor.
Agave has now raised $25.5 million and its post-money valuation is around $100 million.
Turkey is quickly becoming home to many of the biggest gaming startups in a trend started by Peak Games, which Zynga acquired for $1.8 billion in 2020. Peak alumni later formed Dream Games, which ultimately raised time 255 million dollars, Tripledot and Spyke. , which raised $50 million earlier this year (it had launched with $55 million in funding before even releasing a single title).
Unlike the others, Agave is only an offshoot of Peak in the indirect sense: CEO Alper Oner had moved to the US to study computer engineering at UC Berkeley, and stayed in the Bay Area working and trying to figure out what he wanted to focus on. . “I knew I wanted to be in the technology business,” he said. “But at that time, the Turkish ecosystem was not very big.” Back then, Peak was growing rapidly, but beyond that, there was e-commerce and not much else, he said.
Then COVID-19 hit and Oner decided to return home, where he met up with his high school friends Ali Baran Terzioglu, Burak Kar and Oguzhan Merdivenli, and they started talking about what they could build together.
They jumped into casual gaming partly because of their own interests as gamers and partly because they could see how they could bring together what they understood and knew about technology.
It’s also a sign of how strict the formula for creating casual games has become: Agave had published only one other game before Find the Cat, a puzzle game called Wonder Link. It’s a flop compared to its second attempt, with downloads in the hundreds of thousands since its launch in July 2023. Compare that to the stories you hear about Rovio’s early days: it did 51 games – all failures – before finally hitting the big time with Angry Birds.
Find the Cat is very much a product of everything that has come before, as well as what is around the corner. Like other casual games, it relies on both in-app purchases and in-app advertising (it uses AppLovin, like many other) to earn money. On Android alone, it has now made $10 million in revenue, so Sensor tower estimates.
Oner said the company uses AI a lot in the creative process: in the past, the company would have had five or six artists working on a single screen (one of the images has 20 or 30 cats hiding). Now, he said the company is using AI to make the initial images, and then humans come in to “polish” them.
The company doesn’t use AI to code, he said, because nothing has proven to be as effective as humans on this front. But you can imagine how Agave could bring more AI-driven personalization into the mix over time.
Polish seems to be the word of the moment. Rob Moffat, the partner who led Balderton’s investment, said he believes Agave has the potential to be a $100 million revenue company, in part because of how sticky the game is so far in Find the Cat, and partly due to other encouraging signs.
“They’re building this really strong team working on a lot of interesting concepts, finding these interesting mechanics for the games and turning them into a really polished and fun experience. “We support the capacity that they have created to be able to do that,” he said.