$6m · Seed · Gaming · Istanbul, Türkiye
Istanbul-based Bold Games has raised $6m in seed funding led by Arcadia Gaming Partners, Makers Fund and e2vc, with JIMCO and several angel investors participating. PocketGamer.biz first reported the round. The studio is building casual puzzle games for global audiences and used the financing to expand its team.
The company was founded in 2025 by Ulaş Mergen, Atakan Tuğlu, Candaş Demirel and Barış İncesu, whose prior experience includes Dream Games, Rollic, Bigger Games, Agave Games and ZeptoLab. Its first title, Market Match, is available on iOS and Android and combines sorting mechanics with a more layered stacking and step system.
A small team is financing a portfolio, not one launch
Mergen later described the financing as a seed investment for team building, rather than capital to scale Market Match. Bold Games had nine people at the time of the interview and planned to grow only to 12–14. The distinction matters: scaling a free-to-play game can require substantial user-acquisition spending, while this round gives the studio more capacity to develop and test the products that might eventually justify that spend.
Bold Games says it is building to reach millions of players, but its operating model starts with a deliberately small group. Keeping development compact can shorten feedback loops across game design, art and data. It also concentrates execution risk: a portfolio strategy only works if the team can move from prototypes to games with durable retention and monetisation, not simply produce more concepts.
Prototype speed moves the bottleneck to player behaviour
The studio's process separates a short mechanics prototype from a longer build that tests level design and obstacles. Mergen said Bold Games had aimed for a one-week prototype followed by seven weeks of implementation, while newer AI tools were pushing it to compress that cycle further. The commercial value of that speed is the cost of learning: weak ideas can be rejected earlier, leaving more time and capital for the concepts that show stronger player response.
Market Match is the first proof point, not the whole thesis. Bold Games is adapting familiar casual-puzzle formats through mechanics and level design rather than betting on an entirely new genre. That can lower the cost of explaining a game to players, but it leaves little room for undifferentiated execution. The next test is whether the studio's faster iteration produces a repeatable pipeline of games with enough retention to support paid distribution.
