Agave, the startup behind Get a Cat, raises $18M

A startup from Turkey that created a popular mobile game where you have to find cats in increasingly complex Wally-style drawings has now secured something else: $18 million in funding. Agave Games, creator of Find the Cat, will use the Series A to build its team and work on future titles, starting with at least two more over the next year.

The funding comes at a time when traditional mobile games — word puzzles, physical puzzles, number puzzles, farm building, and more — continue to garner large audiences and revenue. Find the Cat surpassed 10 million downloads in its first half of life (only released in August). “It’s the next Tripledot,” said one investor, referring to the newly appointed mobile game studio that has raised tons of capital at a large valuation.

Felix Capital and Balderton Capital are co-leading the round, with E2VC participating. All three firms were already investors: Balderton had also led Agave’s seed round, which had Akin Babayigit, founder of Tripledot Studios, as an investor.

Agave has now raised $25.5 million, and its post-money valuation is in the region of $100 million.

Turkey is fast becoming home to many big game startups in a trend started by Peak Games, which Zynga earned $1.8 billion in 2020. Peak’s alums then went on to form Dream Games, which eventually raised $255 million, Tripledot, and Spyke. , which raised $50 million earlier this year (it started with $55 million in funding before releasing a single title).

Unlike the others, Agave is a High Sprout only in an indirect sense: CEO Alper Oner had 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 the technology business,” she said. “But at that time, the ecosystem in Turkey was not very big.” At the time, Peak was growing fast, but beyond that, there was e-commerce and not much else, he said.

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

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

And it’s a sign of how strong the genre of casual games has become: Agave had only published 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 by hundreds of thousands since its release in July 2023. Compare that to the stories you hear about Rovio’s early days: it made 51 games – all flops – before it finally hit the bonanza with Angry. Birds.

Find the Cat is a product of everything that’s come before, and what’s next. Similar to other mainstream games, it relies on both in-app purchases and in-app advertising (it uses AppLovin, like many others) to make money. On Android alone, it has now brought in $10 million in revenue, according to SensorTower estimates.

Oner said the company uses AI a lot in the creative process: In the past, the company would have five or six artists working on one screen (one of the images where 20 or 30 cats are hidden). Now, he said, the company is using AI to create the first images, and humans are coming in to “polish it.”

He said the company does not use AI in coding because there is no evidence that it works as well as humans in this regard. But you can imagine how Agave could build AI-enhanced personalization into the mix over time.

Polish seems to be the current word. Rob Moffat, the partner who led Balderton’s investment, said he believes Agave has the potential to become a $100 million company, partly because of how well the game has stuck so far in Find the Cat, and partly because of other encouraging signs. .

“They’re building this strong team that’s working on a bunch of interesting concepts, finding these interesting game mechanics and turning them into a polished, fun experience. We support the skills they have built so they can do that,” he said.