Circle Games raises $25M Series A led by Tencent

Circle Games, the Istanbul mobile puzzle studio behind Sort Express, has closed a $25 million Series A led by Tencent, with BITKRAFT Ventures, e2vc, APY Ventures and a16z Speedrun participating, to push its new title Jelly Escape into more markets and at least double the team.

European gaming capital is supposed to be cautious right now – fewer rounds, tighter cheques, consolidation everywhere you look. And yet the world’s largest games company by revenue just led a $25 million Series A on the Bosphorus, fourteen months after the studio’s seed. Below, I lay out the round, the founders behind it, and the pattern this cheque confirms about who is actually funding games in our corner of the world.

The round: $25 million, fourteen months after seed

Circle Games announced the round on 24 September 2026. Tencent leads; BITKRAFT Ventures, e2vc, APY Ventures and a16z Speedrun participate. It lands fourteen months after the studio’s $7.25 million seed of July 2025, which BITKRAFT led with Play Ventures, e2vc, APY Ventures and a16z Speedrun alongside, and it takes total disclosed funding to $32.25 million.

Read that seed list again: four of the five institutional backers came back for the A. In this market, insiders re-upping is the cleanest signal a cap table can send.

Use of funds, in the company’s own words: expand Jelly Escape, its recently released second title, into additional markets, keep growing Sort Express globally, at least double headcount, and build new mobile games. “Sort Express showed us that we had the right approach,” said co-founder and CEO Gokturk Balikci in the announcement.

Four founders off Istanbul’s puzzle bench

Circle Games makes free-to-play mobile puzzle games. Sort Express, its debut, went global in 2025 and passed eight-figure revenue within its first year on the market, per the company. Jelly Escape, the follow-up, is freshly released and already earmarked for international expansion. The studio counted 12 people at seed; this round is built to at least double that.

Look at where the founders come from. Balikci ran product at Gram Games and Playable Factory. Mustafa Ozdemir led a studio at Playable Factory and managed product at Good Job Games. Mehmet Ay ran growth at Good Job Games. Arda Ozarslan wrote software at Dream Games. That is not a random team; that is a tour of Istanbul’s casual-gaming production line.

We have seen this movie before. Zynga paid $250 million for Gram Games in 2018 and $1.8 billion for Peak in 2020; Dream Games turned Royal Match into one of the world’s highest-grossing puzzle games. Every exit seeded the next wave of founders, and Circle Games is exactly that wave.

A $149 billion market that rewards genre discipline

So what does the world’s largest games company see in a two-title studio? A market worth sizing, first. Mobile games will generate USD 148.92 billion globally in 2026 and USD 241.66 billion by 2031, a 10.17% CAGR (Mordor Intelligence, July 2026). Casual games – the bucket puzzle titles sit in – made up 29.32% of that market in 2025, the largest genre slice, per the same report. No analyst publishes a credible standalone figure for the puzzle genre itself; what the charts show instead is that its leaders monetise for years, not quarters.

For scale: in the same week, Helsinki’s Kasvu Therapeutics raised a €30 million Series A, and $25 million sits in the upper band of the European Series A cheques we tracked these past days in our fundraising data.

Strategics are writing the lead cheques

Here is the pattern worth keeping. This is the third round we covered this week where the decisive money is strategic rather than purely financial. C.H.BECK took majority ownership of Noxtua in a €100M+ Series C. Mistral joined Clastix’s €2.9 million seed as both investor and production user. Now Tencent leads an Istanbul Series A.

The reality is that European growth funds still hesitate on gaming, a sector our continent’s studios happen to be very good at. The good news is that strategic leads bring more than money: distribution, live-ops experience, and the patience a hit-driven business needs. What we are watching now is whether the next Istanbul breakout raises its Series B from European funds, or whether Asian and US strategics keep taking those seats while our growth investors study the sector from a distance.

One honest note on geography: Istanbul sits at the very edge of Europe’s startup map, and some trackers leave it off entirely. The talent never asked for permission. It moves between London, Berlin and the Bosphorus, and the puzzle bench it built keeps producing companies the rest of the world pays to own a piece of.

The lazy read on this round is that mobile gaming is locked up by incumbents and the only exits run through Zynga or Tencent. The real story is that a decade of exits built a bench, and the bench keeps producing new studios. Let’s watch which one steps off it next.