As the mobile internet and apps became the mass medium for internet consumption in the last 20 years, emerging markets like Latin America and MENA became a hotbed for games developers as they offered a fast and easy path to monetisation. Turkey was no different in that trajectory. So it’s no surprise that the latest rising star in this arena is Grand Games, which has raised a $70 million Series B led by Balderton Capital’s Growth Fund.
The Istanbul-based mobile gaming startup - launched in only 2024 by Bekir Batuhan Çelebi, Mehmet Çalım and Mustafa Fırtına - has now raised $103 million in total, less than two years after being founded. Existing investors Bek Ventures and Laton Ventures also joined the round, alongside angel investor Mert Gür.
Grand Games develops hybrid casual mobile games, mainly puzzle titles designed for short, repeat play sessions - very typical of the game studios to emerge from Turkey in the last few years. That formula is already producing results. Grand Games has passed 50 million downloads globally across more than 200 countries.
Its best-known games include Magic Sort!, Block Out and Car Match. The startup says it is already generating more than $1 million in daily revenue and has recorded 5x year-on-year revenue growth.
The round comes as Turkey’s mobile gaming ecosystem continues to produce major outcomes, following Peak Games, Dream Games, Loom Games and others.
The round also lands in the middle of a broader Turkish mobile gaming surge.
Zynga’s $1.8 billion acquisition of Peak Games in 2020 helped put Istanbul on the global gaming map. Since then, Dream Games has reached a multi-billion-dollar valuation, Scopely has bought a majority stake in Loom Games, and investors have continued to back studios built by alumni of Turkey’s earlier gaming successes.
Turkey’s mobile gaming startups are on a 10-year roll
Turkey has become one of the few European startup ecosystems where mobile gaming is not a side hustle, but borderline the flagship export industry (although fintech is rising too).
Over the last decade, Istanbul in particular has almost turned into a factory for puzzle, casual, hyper-casual and hybrid-casual games. Helped by repeat founders from Peak Games, Gram Games and Rollic, a deep pool of engineers, low-costs and global investors have flooded into studios that can scale products quickly into the US app-store charts.
The inflection points for this rise were Gram Games’ sale to Zynga in 2018, Peak Games’ $1.8bn sale to Zynga in 2020 and Rollic’s sale to Zynga later that year. Notice a trend? Zynga’s 2020 Peak acquisition alone marked Turkey’s first billion-dollar-plus startup exit and brought global attention to Istanbul’s games talent.
The market today
The most recent ecosystem data shows the Turkish gaming vertical rebounding after the COVID crisis and the 2022–23 valuations correction. According to The State of Turkish Startup Ecosystem 2025, gaming investment in Turkey fell to $35m across 50 rounds in 2023, then recovered to $129m in 2024 and $181m in 2025. The same report says Istanbul now has 757 active gaming studios, making it the second-largest gaming hub in Europe after London, supported by 12 gaming-specific investors, 13 incubators and 22 gaming-focused accelerator programmes. Pretty insane huh?
2025–2026: Scaling-up and pivoting
However, the latest phase is no longer only about Zynga just buying Turkish studios. Private equity, international VCs and growth funds are all now in the market hoping to get into these rocket ships faster than the later stage funds and the local players, especially before the valuations get out of control.
Dream Games reached another level in 2025 when it was valued at $4bn to $5bn, post CVC deal. Backers including Balderton, Makers Fund, Index Ventures and IVP reportedly exiting entirely, while the founders retained a majority ownership.
Good Job Games raised a $60m Series A in 2025, co-led by Menlo Ventures and Anthos Capital, following a $23m seed round six months earlier.
Cypher Games raised a $30m Series A in 2025 led by The Raine Group and Play Ventures. Bigger Games raised $25m Series A in 2025, led by Goodwater Capital. Circle Games raised $7.25m in seed funding led by BITKRAFT Ventures.
Then came 2026. Scopely, owned by Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games Group, agreed to acquire Istanbul-based Loom Games in a deal worth up to $1bn, after Loom’s puzzle title Pixel Flow reportedly attracted more than 10m users within six months.
The core advantage in Turkey is speed. Turkish studios tend to be small, with intensely product-driven teams that iterate quickly, and understand mobile distribution.
There is also a clear mafia effect. The Alumni of Peak Games went on to found or staff many of the next-generation studios. Dream Games, Spyke, Bigger, Ace and others benefited from that talent.
So if the first Turkish wave was heavily associated with hyper-casual and puzzle mechanics, the second wave generation is moving toward hybrid-casual, social puzzles and entertainment franchises which can spin out of the games brands themselves.
However, the ecosystem still has constraints.
Turkey has seed and early-stage funding but scale-up rounds still tend to require US, UK or European investors. The second is that this is a hits business, so much harder than, say, SaaS. The third is the games market reaching maturity and saturation.
But given Turkey is now Europe’s biggest mobile gaming production hub after the UK, and arguably the most efficient one, it has a bright future ahead.
