Bek Ventures, Laton Ventures, and angel investor Mert Gür are back. Total funding for the two-year-old studio reaches $103m. The round arrives weeks after Scopely’s $1bn buyout of Loom Games and CVC’s $5bn deal for Dream Games.
Grand Games Oyun ve Yazılım, the Istanbul-based mobile gaming studio behind Magic Sort and Car Match, has raised $70m in a Series B funding round led by Balderton Capital’s Growth Fund, the company said on 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 Grand Games’ total funding to $103m.
Grand Games was founded in early 2024 by a team that previously built Zen Match at Moon Active. Magic Sort, the studio’s first commercial title, broke into Apple’s top-selling casual-gaming charts within six months of release.
Its second title, Car Match, followed shortly after. By the time the Series A closed in January 2025, the two games were producing combined gross app revenue in the order of $4m per month.
The Series B suggests that the revenue trajectory has continued, although Grand Games has not disclosed updated figures.
The round arrives in a Turkish gaming market that has produced more positive M&A news in the past six months than any other startup category in the country.
Scopely acquired a majority stake in Loom Games at a $1bn-plus valuation in March, just under a year after the studio’s founding. CVC took a strategic position in Dream Games at around a $5bn valuation.
Both deals followed Zynga’s earlier $1.8bn acquisition of Peak Games in 2020, the transaction widely credited with kickstarting the Istanbul gaming scene. Investors are betting that the same playbook, mobile-casual studios run by alumni of previous Turkish gaming successes, will continue to compound.
Grand Games is a direct heir to that lineage. Balderton’s $1.3bn vintage announced last year, backed Dream Games at Series A, and is now stacking the same conviction on its successor.
The structural reasons behind Turkey’s mobile-gaming concentration are well-rehearsed but worth repeating: a deep technical-and-creative talent pool concentrated around the Peak alumni network, a domestic cost base that lets small teams achieve global-quality production without Western European salary structures, and a regulatory environment that is, at the moment at least, more accommodating to gaming companies than to most other sectors.
The Turkish government announced earlier this year that it would cover half of mobile-game development costs under a new incentive programme, which has further accelerated formation activity.
Bloomberg’s reporting on the Grand Games round explicitly frames the deal as evidence that this incentive structure is starting to bear fruit at the venture-capital level.
For Grand Games specifically, the use of funds is conventional: hiring, additional title development, and user acquisition spend in the high-leverage mobile channels where puzzle and casual studios compete most fiercely.
The studio is reported to be working on additional titles in the pouring-puzzle and car-customisation genres, both of which have demonstrated commercial durability in mobile casual gaming. The competitive set is crowded but tractable.
Peak, Dream and Spyke all operate adjacent franchises; the global market for mobile casual gaming generated approximately $32bn in 2025 by Newzoo’s count, with the Turkish studios collectively responsible for an outsized share.
The numbers underlying the round will satisfy growth-fund metrics rather than venture-style ones.
Balderton Growth Fund II, raised in 2024 as part of a paired $1.3bn vintage alongside Balderton’s $615m Series A vehicle, targets European companies between Series B and IPO. Grand Games at Series B is precisely the stage that fund is designed to back, and the doubling down on an existing portfolio company is a pattern Balderton has repeated across Dream Games, Revolut and Wayve.
The implicit thesis is that the same firms that produce outsized early-stage outcomes can be backed through growth as well, provided the metrics keep delivering.
That logic works particularly well in mobile casual gaming, where the unit economics are unusually transparent. A studio either has a title that returns its user-acquisition spend on a sub-twelve-month payback period, or it does not. Grand Games’ published revenue trajectory suggests it does.
The Series B is therefore less a bet on a thesis than a continuation of a position that has already paid in the public app-store charts. The valuation has not been disclosed; comparable Turkish casual-gaming Series B and growth rounds have typically landed in the $400m to $800m range based on contemporaneous transactions and analyst commentary.
What Grand Games does next is the more interesting variable. The most common path for a Turkish casual-gaming studio after a Series B has been a multi-year run-up to a strategic acquisition by one of the US-listed gaming consolidators.
Zynga (now owned by Take-Two), Scopely, Playtika, MTG and Embracer have all completed deals in this category in the past six years.
The buyer roster matters less than the structural pattern: studios that hit a recurring-revenue scale of $200m-plus tend to be acquired rather than to 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.
Grand Games is not yet at that scale, although the trajectory implied by the Series B is consistent with reaching it. If the studio keeps shipping titles at the cadence its founders have signalled, a $200m run-rate within twenty-four months is plausible rather than ambitious.
Whether the eventual outcome is an acquisition or an independent run depends on the founders and on what the IPO window looks like in the late 2020s. The current window is open enough that the optionality matters.
In the immediate term, the round signals two things. First, that the Turkish mobile-gaming pipeline behind the headline unicorn outcomes is genuine and is producing the next wave of investable companies.
Second, that European growth capital is willing to write meaningful cheques into that pipeline at valuations the global category leaders can underwrite.
Both are useful data points for the broader question of whether Europe’s deepest pockets of technology capital can compound around a specific sector long enough to produce a sustained run of multi-billion-dollar outcomes.
Mobile casual gaming, on present evidence, is closer to producing that run than most other European technology subsectors.
Grand Games’ $70m is the latest line on that chart. The next one is somewhere on the studio’s product roadmap.
