Agave, the startup behind Find the Cat, raises $18 million

A startup that created the hit casual mobile game to find cats in Turkey where is wallyStylized paintings of increasing complexity found something else: $18 million in funding. Agave GamesThe creator of Find the Cat will use the Series A to build a team and work on future titles, starting with at least two more in the next year.

The funding comes as casual mobile games — word puzzles, physical puzzles, number puzzles, farm building and others — continue to gain a large audience and revenue. Find the Cat surpassed 10 million downloads in its first quarter of life (only released in August). “This is the next Tripledot,” said one investor, referring to the maker of the hit casual mobile game. tons of money at a great price.

Felix Capital and Balderton Capital are leading this round with participation from E2VC. All three were already investors: Balderton also led Agave’s seed round, which included Tripledot Studios co-founder Akın Babayigit.

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

Starting with Peak Games, which Zynga bought for $1.8 billion in 2020, many of the biggest game startups are emerging from Turkey. Peak alums later formed Dream Games. collected 255 million dollarsTripledot and Spyke raised $50 million earlier this year (and first It started its operation with the financial resources of 55 million US dollars before even releasing a title).

Unlike the others, Agave is only an offshoot in an indirect sense: CEO Alper Öner moved to the US to study computer engineering at UC Berkeley, and he worked in the Bay Area trying to figure out what he wanted. pay attention “I knew I wanted to be in the technology business,” he said. “But at that time, Turkey’s ecosystem was not very big.” At the time, Peak was growing rapidly, but outside of that was e-commerce and not much else, he said.

Then Covid-19 hit and Öner decided to return home, where he got together with his high school friends Ali Baran Terzioglu, Burak Kar and Oguzhan Merdivenli and started talking about what they could build together.

They hit on casual games partly because of their own interest as gamers, and partly because they could see how they could combine what they understood and knew about technology to great effect.

But it’s a sign of how rigid the formula for making casual games has become: Agave had only published one other game before Find the Cat, a puzzle game called Wonder Link — a failure compared to its second attempt, with hundreds of downloads and thousands since its July 2023 release. . Contrast that with the stories you hear about the early days of Rovio: the company 51 games – all flops – before finally hitting the bonanza with Angry Birds.

Find the cat is a product of what came before it and what came around the corner. Like other casual games, it relies on both in-app purchases and in-app advertising (which AppLovin uses). many others) to earn money. It has now generated $10 million in revenue on Android alone Sensor Tower estimates.

Öner said that the company uses artificial intelligence a lot in the creative process: In the past, the company had five or six artists working on a single screen (one of 20 or 30 hidden cats). Now, he said, the company uses artificial intelligence to produce the initial images, and humans come in later to “polish” it.

The company doesn’t use artificial intelligence for coding, he said, because nothing has proven to be as effective on that front as humans. But you can imagine that Agave could build more AI-powered personalization into the mix over time.

Polish seems to be the word of the moment. Rob Moffat, partner who led the investment for Balderton, said Agave has the potential to be a $100 million revenue company, which he believes is partly because of how sticky a game Find the Cat has been so far and partly because of other encouraging signals. “They’re building this really strong team that’s working on a bunch of interesting concepts, finding these interesting mechanics for games and turning them into a really polished, fun experience. We support their ability to do this.”