Bek Ventures, Laton Ventures and angel investor Mert Gür are back. Total funding for the two-year study reaches $103 million. The round comes weeks after Scopely’s $1 billion purchase of Loom Games and CVC’s $5 billion deal for Dream Games.
Grand Games Oyun ve Yazılım, the Istanbul-based mobile game studio behind Magic Sort and Car Match, has raised $70 million in a Series B funding round led by Balderton Capital Growth Fund, the company said Monday.
Bek Ventures, Laton Ventures and angel investor Mert Gür participated alongside Balderton, which is doubling down on its January 2025 Series A position.
The latest round brings the total funding for the Big Games to $103 million.
Grand Games was founded in early 2024 by a team that previously built Zen Match on Moon Active. Magic Sort, the studio’s first commercial title, burst onto Apple’s best-selling casual game charts within six months of its launch.
His second title, Car Match, came shortly after. By the time Series A closed in January 2025, the two games were generating combined gross app revenue on the order of $4 million per month.
The Series B suggests the revenue trajectory has continued, although Grand Games has not revealed updated figures.
The round comes to a Turkish gaming market that has produced more positive M&A news in the last six months than any other startup category in the country.
Scopely acquired a majority stake in Loom Games for a valuation of more than $1 billion in March, just under a year after the studio was founded. CVC took a strategic position in Dream Games with a valuation of around $5 billion.
Both deals followed Zynga’s earlier $1.8 billion acquisition of Peak Games in 2020, a transaction widely credited with boosting Istanbul’s gaming scene. Investors are betting that the same playbook, informal mobile studios run by alumni of previous Turkish gaming successes, will continue to pile up.
Grand Games is a direct heir to that lineage. Balderton’s $1.3 billion harvest was announced last yearHe backed Dream Games in Serie A and now has the same conviction in his successor.
The structural reasons behind Turkey’s mobile gaming concentration are well-rehearsed but bear repeating: a deep pool of technical and creative talent concentrated around Peak’s alumni network, a domestic cost base that allows small teams to achieve global-quality production without Western European wage structures, and a regulatory environment that is, at least for the moment, more accommodating to gaming companies than most other sectors.
The Turkish government announced earlier this year that it would cover half of mobile game development costs under a new incentive program, which has further accelerated training activity.
Bloomberg’s report on the Big Games round explicitly frames the deal as evidence that this incentive structure is starting to pay off at the venture capital level.
For Grand Games specifically, the use of funds is conventional: hiring, developing additional titles, and spending on user acquisition in the high-leverage mobile channels where casual and puzzle studios compete most fiercely.
The studio is reportedly working on additional titles in the puzzle and car customization genres, both of which have demonstrated commercial durability in mobile casual games. The competitive set is saturated but manageable.
Peak, Dream and Spyke operate adjacent franchises; The global mobile casual games market generated approximately $32 billion in 2025, according to Newzoo’s count, and Turkish studios are collectively responsible for a huge share.
The numbers underlying the round will satisfy growth fund metrics rather than risk ones.
Balderton Growth Fund II, raised in 2024 as part of a $1.3 billion combination alongside Balderton’s $615 million Series A vehicle, targets European companies between Series B and IPO. Grand Games in Series B is precisely the scenario the fund is designed to support, and doubling down on an existing portfolio company is a pattern Balderton has repeated at Dream Games, Revolut and Wayve.
The implicit thesis is that the same companies that produce outsized results in the early stages can also be supported through growth, as long as the metrics continue to deliver results.
That logic works particularly well in mobile casual games, where the unit economics are unusually transparent. A studio has a title that returns its investment in user acquisition in a payback period of less than twelve months, or it does not. Grand Games’ published revenue trajectory suggests yes.
The Series B is therefore not so much a bet on a thesis as the continuation of a position that has already borne fruit in the lists of public app stores. The valuation has not been disclosed; Comparable Turkish growth and Series B rounds of casual games have generally landed in the range of $400 million to $800 million based on contemporaneous transactions and analyst commentary.
What Grand Games does next is the most interesting variable. The most common path for a Turkish casual games studio after a Series B has been a multi-year lead-up to a strategic acquisition by one of the US-listed game consolidators.
Zynga (now owned by Take-Two), Scopely, Playtika, MTG and Embracer have closed deals in this category in the last six years.
The list of buyers matters less than the structural pattern: Studios that reach a recurring revenue scale of more than $200 million tend to be acquired rather than remain independent, in part because the global publishing and platform deals available to a portfolio company are more lucrative than those available to a single-studio operator.
The Big Games are not yet on that scale, although the trajectory implied by Serie B is consistent with reaching it. If the studio continues to ship titles at the rate its founders have outlined, a run rate of $200 million in twenty-four months is more plausible than ambitious.
Whether the end result is an acquisition or a standalone operation depends on the founders and what the IPO window looks like in the late 2020s. The current window is open enough for optionality to matter.
Immediately, the round points out two things. Firstly, that the Turkish mobile gaming portfolio behind the unicorn’s results is genuine and is generating the next wave of investable companies.
Second, that European growth capital is willing to write significant checks on that portfolio at valuations that global category leaders can underwrite.
Both are useful data points for the broader question of whether Europe’s deepest pockets of tech capital can accumulate around a specific sector long enough to produce a sustained streak of multibillion-dollar results.
Mobile casual games, based on current evidence, are closer to achieving that streak than most other European tech subsectors.
Grand Games’ $70 million is the bottom line on that graph. The next one is somewhere on the studio’s product roadmap.
