Within a year of raising their seed round, the founders of Circle Games have a live game at an eight-figure annualized revenue run rate, two more titles coming up behind it, and Tencent leading their Series A. Most mobile studios need many years to get here. Circle got here with their first game and a team of 28.
We believe the next generation of game studios will be built by combining exceptional creativity with a deeply data-driven approach. From product and marketing to AI-powered personalization, we’ve always wanted to excel at both art and execution. To realize that ambition, we wanted partners who genuinely understand games. From our very first conversation, Jasper and the BITKRAFT team felt like an extension of Circle — their experience, network, and long-term perspective make them the ideal partner for the journey ahead.
We have spent a lot of time in Istanbul over the past years, and we keep coming back for the same reason: Turkey has become one of the very few places in the world that consistently produces global hit mobile games. Zynga acquired Peak for $1.8 billion. Dream Games turned Royal Match into one of the highest-grossing puzzle games in the world within a few years of founding. Gram Games and Rollic went to global publishers, and most recently Scopely acquired Loom Games for $1 billion. For a country most people outside of games wouldn't name as a gaming hub, that is a remarkable run.
What excites us most is how the ecosystem compounds, and the entrepreneurial strength of the local founders. Nearly every successful Turkish studio was started by people who learned the craft at the one before it. Dream Games was founded by Peak alumni. Those studios then trained a new generation of product leads, designers, UA managers and engineers who have seen up close what it takes to build a game that reaches the top of the charts and stays there. Add a deep engineering talent pool out of universities like Bilkent and METU, impactful government support for game studios, and a cost base that lets a team run lean far longer than a comparable team in the US, and you get studios that can take more shots on goal with the same capital. The global strategics have noticed. Zynga, Scopely and now Tencent have all made big bets on the country.
That success also means Istanbul is crowded. Over the last two years, dozens of new studios have raised seed rounds, many of them going after the same casual and puzzle genres. Far fewer have made it to a meaningful Series A. Telling apart the teams that can become the next Peak or Dream Games from the ones pattern-matching on them is the whole job, and it's why we spend so much time with founders in person before we invest.
Circle is our first investment in Turkey and the clearest example we've seen of that lineage at work. The four co-founders, Göktürk Balıkcı, Mustafa Özdemir, Mehmet Ay and Arda Özarslan, have known each other for more than a decade, going back to university, and have worked together across several of the studios that built Turkey's reputation. Göktürk was Head of New Games at Gram Games. Mustafa was gameplay lead at Good Job Games, where he was offered the chance to run a new studio inside the company and turned it down to build his own. Mehmet ran growth at Good Job, and Arda was an engineer at Dream Games. Three of them worked together at Playable Factory, building playable ads, starting their journey deeply understanding top-of-funnel and engagement in a highly iterative environment.
When we led their seed round in early 2025, Sort Express was a first build the team had developed in a couple of months. Even in untargeted test campaigns, the engagement numbers stood out, serving as the initial proof point that the team can build the success they previously built for others now for themselves. Besides their strong work ethic, what convinced us was the team’s product craft, iteration speed, and a high bar for excellence. They had already killed an earlier concept because it wasn't good enough. “Details are the product” is how Göktürk puts it. This philosophy shows up in every haptic, every difficulty curve, every level transition. And unlike most product-led teams, they treated marketing as part of the product from day one, testing creatives long before the game was finished.
Puzzle is one of mobile gaming's most contested categories. Hundreds of studios enter it every year, and most fail because they ship games that are almost good enough: good enough to hook a player for a session, not good enough to bring them back a month later. Sort Express brings players back. The team has improved it month after month since launch, and its day-30 retention now puts it among the top performers in the genre, with players spending more than 75 minutes a day in the game. These are metrics that take most studios several titles and several years to learn how to build.
What made us double down was how quickly they did it again. By the time we were evaluating the Series A, their second game was in soft launch with early retention and playtime on par with Sort Express, and a third game was in prototyping. Neither was part of the plan when we invested, but rather a formula for repeatable success. Along the way, they built the systems a studio needs to ideate, iterate, and ship at increasing velocity: player segmentation that works across games, and internal AI tools that produce all of their marketing creatives, generate levels, and simulate how different types of players will play through them. On the growth side, they only turned up spend once the paybacks were there. And they have done all of this with a lean team, putting most of their capital into finding players rather than into headcount.
When we led the Seed round, we saw a hungry team with exceptional product sense, audience intuition, and fast shipping velocity. Within only a year, they’ve gone from a single pre-launch MVP to a live title at 8-figure revenue scale and outstanding metrics, plus two promising games in soft launch, all while staying remarkably capital efficient.
The next Phase
Tencent leading the $25M Series A, with BITKRAFT co-investing alongside continuing partners e2vc, APY Ventures, and a16z speedrun doubling down, confirms what we have seen from the inside. The next phase is about turning two strong games into a portfolio, and a group of talented founders into a studio that keeps producing hits. Turkey has shown more than once what that looks like when it works. We're proud to keep backing Göktürk, Mustafa, Mehmet, Arda, and the whole Circle team as they build what we believe will become one of the country's defining game studios.
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Specific investments described herein do not represent all investment decisions made by BITKRAFT. The reader should not assume that investment decisions identified and discussed were or will be profitable. This is provided for informational purposes only about BITKRAFT products. None of the information provided should be regarded as a suggestion to engage in or refrain from any investment related course of action. None of the above should be taken as investment advice or an advertisement for investment services. Inherent in any investment is the risk of loss.
