Agave, the startup behind Find the Cat, finds $18M

A startup out of Turkey that has constructed successful informal cell recreation the place it’s important to discover cats in Where’s Wally-style drawings of accelerating complexity has now discovered one thing else: $18 million in funding. Agave Games, the creator of Discover the Cat, might be utilizing the Sequence A to construct out its workforce and to work on future titles, beginning with at the very 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 remaining — proceed to rake in large 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 following Tripledot,” stated one investor, referring to the hit informal cell recreation studio that has itself raised tons of money at a big valuation. 

Felix Capital and Balderton Capital are co-leading this spherical, with E2VC collaborating. All three companies 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 changing into residence to loads of the largest recreation 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 kind 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).

In contrast to the others, Agave is simply a Peak offshoot within the oblique sense: CEO Alper Oner had moved to the U.S. to review pc engineering at UC Berkeley, and he stayed within the Bay Space working and making an attempt to determine what he wished to deal with. “I knew I wished to be within the tech enterprise,” he stated. “However on the time, the Turkish ecosystem simply wasn’t very large.” Again then, Peak was rising quick, however past that, there was e-commerce and never a complete lot extra, he stated. 

Then COVID-19 hit, and Oner determined to return residence, the place he got here collectively together with his highschool mates Ali Baran Terzioglu, Burak Kar and Oguzhan Merdivenli, they usually began speaking about what they might 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 might 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 system for making informal video games has develop into: Agave had revealed just one different recreation earlier than Discover the Cat, a puzzle recreation referred to as Surprise Hyperlink. It’s a flop in comparison with their second strive, with downloads within the a whole lot of 1000’s since its launch in July 2023. Evaluate that to the tales you hear of Rovio’s early days: it made 51 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 so much within the artistic course of: Prior to now, the corporate would have had 5 or 6 artists engaged on a single display (one of many footage through 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 will not be 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 would possibly construct extra AI-fueled personalization into the combination over time.

Polish appears to be the phrase of the second. Rob Moffat, the associate 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 to date in Discover the Cat, and partly due to different encouraging indicators.

“They’re constructing this actually sturdy workforce engaged on a bunch of attention-grabbing ideas, discovering these attention-grabbing mechanics for video games and making them into a extremely polished, enjoyable expertise. We’re backing the potential they’ve constructed to have the ability to try this,” he stated.