Agave, the startup behind Find the Cat, has raised $18 million

A startup from Türkiye has designed an amazing mobile game where you have to find cats Where’s Wally?The increasingly complex pattern found something else: $18 million in funding. Cactus gamescreator of Find the Cat, will use the Series A to build the team and work on future titles, starting with at least two more titles 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 attract huge audiences and revenues. Find the Cat surpassed 10 million downloads in its first quarter (it was only released in August). “It’s the next Tripledot,” said one investor, referring to the hugely successful casual mobile game maker that has raised its own money Tons of money at a great valuation.

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

Agave has now raised $25.5 million, and has a post-fund valuation of around $100 million.

Many of the biggest gaming startups have emerged from Turkey, starting with Peak Games, which was acquired by Zynga for $1.8 billion in 2020. The Peak alums then went on to found Dream Games, which eventually went on to It raised $255 millionAnd Tripledot and Spyke, which raised $50 million earlier this year (and initially… It was launched with $55 million in funding before launching even a single title).

Unlike the others, Agave is just an offshoot of Peak in the indirect sense: CEO Albert Honor 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 technology,” he said. “But at that time the Turkish ecosystem was not very large.” At the time, BIC was growing rapidly, but then, there was e-commerce and not much else, he said.

Then COVID-19 hit, and Oner decided to go home, where he met his high school friends Ali Baran Terzioglu, Burak Kar, and Oguzan Merdivinli, and they started talking about what they could build together.

They turned to casual gaming partly because of their own interests as gamers, and partly because they could see how it could combine what they understood and knew about technology, with great impact.

But it’s a sign of how strict the casual game-making formula has become: Agave had only published one other game before Find the Cat, a puzzle game called Wonder Link — a flop compared to its second attempt, with downloads in the hundreds. Thousands since its release in July 2023. Compare that with the stories you’ve heard about Rovio’s early days: the company made 51 matches — all flops — before finally finding a big hit with Angry Birds.

Find the Cat is a product of everything that came before it, and what’s coming around the corner. Similar to other casual games, they tend to have in-app purchases and in-app ads (AppLovin uses e.g Many others) to make money. On Android alone, it now generates $10 million in revenue per Sensor tower Estimates.

Honor said the company uses AI a lot in the creative process: In the past the company had five or six artists working on one screen (one had 20 or 30 cats hidden). Now, he said, the company is using artificial intelligence to take the initial images, and then humans come in to “enhance” them.

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

Polish seems to be the word of the moment. Rob Moffat, the partner who led the investment in Balderton, said he believes Agave has the potential to become a $100 million revenue company, partly because of how difficult the gameplay has been so far in Find the Cat, and partly because of other encouraging signs. “They’re building this really strong team that’s working on a bunch of interesting concepts, finding these interesting mechanics for games and making it a really fun, polished experience. We support the capability that they’ve built to be able to do that.”