Agave, the startup behind Find the Cat, finds $18M

A startup out of Turkey that has built a hit casual mobile game where you have to find cats in Where’s Wally-style drawings of increasing complexity has now found something else: $18 million in funding. Agave Games, the creator of Find the Cat, will be using the Series A to build out its team and to work on future titles, starting with at least two more in the 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 rake in huge audiences and revenues. Find the Cat crossed 10 million downloads in its first quarter of life (it was only released in August). “It’s the next Tripledot,” said one investor, referring to the hit casual mobile game studio that has itself raised tons of money at a big valuation. 

Turkey is fast becoming home to a lot of the biggest game startups in a trend started by Peak Games, which Zynga acquired for $1.8 billion in 2020. Peak’s alums then went on to form Dream Games, which last raised $255 million, Tripledot, and Spyke, which raised $50 million earlier this year (it had launched with $55 million in funding before releasing even a single title).

Unlike the others, Agave is only a Peak offshoot in the indirect sense: CEO Alper Oner had moved to the U.S. to study computer engineering at UC Berkeley, and he 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 tech business,” he said. “But at the time, the Turkish ecosystem just wasn’t very big.” Back then, Peak was growing fast, but beyond that, there was e-commerce and not a whole lot more, he said. 

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

They hit on casual games partly because of their own interests as gamers and partly because they could see how it could bring together what they understood and knew about tech. 

It’s also a mark of just how much tighter the formula for making casual games has become: Agave had published only one other game before Find the Cat, a puzzle game called Wonder Link. It’s a flop compared to their second try, with downloads in the hundreds of thousands since its release in July 2023. Compare that to the stories you hear of Rovio’s early days: it made 51 games — all flops — before finally hitting the bonanza with Angry Birds. 

Find the Cat is very much a product of all that has come before, as well as what is around the corner. Similar to other casual games, it leans both into in-app purchases and in-app advertising (it uses AppLovin, like many others) to make money. On Android alone, it has now netted $10 million in revenues, per SensorTower estimates. 

Oner said the company uses AI a lot in the creative process: In the past, the company would have had five or six artists working on a single screen (one of the pictures in which 20 or 30 cats are hidden). Now, he said that the company is using AI to make the initial pictures, and humans are then coming in to “polish it.”

The company is not using AI for coding, he said, because nothing has proven to be as effective as humans on this front. But you can imagine how Agave might 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 for Balderton, said he believes Agave has the potential to be a $100 million revenue company, partly because of how sticky gameplay is so far in Find the Cat, and partly because of other encouraging signals.

“They’re building this really strong team working on a bunch of interesting concepts, finding these interesting mechanics for games and making them into a really polished, fun experience. We are backing the capability they’ve built to be able to do that,” he said.