A startup from Turkey that developed a popular casual mobile game in which you have to find a cat Where's Wally?Style drawings of increasing complexity have now found something else: $18 million in financing. Agave GamesThe creator of Find the Cat will use Series A to build his team and work on upcoming games, starting with at least two games next year.

The funding comes at a time when casual mobile games—word puzzles, physical puzzles, number puzzles, farming, and others—continue to garner large audiences and revenues. Find the Cat surpassed 10 million downloads in the first quarter of its life (it was only released in August). “This is the next Tripledot,” said one investor, referring to the popular mobile game studio that made it big. tons of money at a great valuation.

Felix Capital and Balderton Capital are co-leading this round with participation from E2VC. All three firms were already investors: Balderton had also led Agave's seed round; Akın Babayiğit, co-founder of Tripledot Studios, also took part as an investor in this round.

Agave has currently raised $25.5 million and its post-money valuation is around $100 million.

In line with the trend started by Peak Games, which Zynga acquired for 1.8 billion dollars in 2020, Türkiye is rapidly hosting many of the largest gaming startups. Peak's graduates later founded Dream Games. Raised $255 millionTripledot and Spyke (which raised $50 million earlier this year It was implemented with a financing of 55 million dollars before publishing even a single title).

Unlike the others, Agave is only an offshoot of Peak in an indirect sense: CEO Alper Öner had moved to the US to study computer engineering at UC Berkeley and was working in the Bay Area, trying to figure out what he wanted to focus on. . “I knew I wanted to be in technology,” he said. “But the Turkish ecosystem was not very large at that time.” At the time, Peak was growing rapidly, but beyond that there was e-commerce and not much more, he said.

Then, with the onset of Covid-19, Öner decided to return home, where he met with his high school friends Ali Baran Terzioğlu, Burak Kar and Oğuzhan Merdivenli and started talking about what they could do together.

They preferred casual games, partly because of their own interests as gamers, and partly because they understood about technology and could see how it could combine what they knew.

It's also a sign of how rigid the formula for making casual games has become: Agave had released only one other game before Find the Cat, a puzzle game called Wonder Link. It's a flop compared to their second attempt, which has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times since its launch in July 2023. Compare this to the stories you've heard about Rovio's early days: 51 games – all flops – before finally hitting the big time with Angry Birds.

Find the Cat is a product of what's come before as well as what's around the corner. Similar to other casual games, it leans into both in-app purchases and in-app advertising (it uses AppLovin, e.g. others) to make money. Currently has $10 million in revenue per capita on Android alone Sensor Tower predictions.

Öner said the company uses AI a lot in the creative process: In the past, the company had five or six artists working on a single screen (one of which featured images with 20 or 30 cats lurking). Now, he said, the company uses AI to create the first photos, and then humans come in to "polish" them.

He said the company doesn't use AI for coding because nothing has proven to be as effective as humans on that front. But you can imagine how Agave could add more AI-powered personalization to 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 become a $100 million revenue company, partly because of how sticky the gameplay in Find the Cat is and partly because of other encouraging signals.

“They make a really strong team, working on a lot of interesting concepts, finding these interesting mechanics for games and turning them into a really polished, fun experience. “We support the talent they have created to do this,” he said.