Spyke Games, a social mobile casual-games company, has closed $55M in a seed round led by notable venture capital firm, Griffin Gaming Partners (GGP). Spyke Games’ co-founding team has an unprecedented track record creating some of the world’s top mobile casual games with previous company exits valued at nearly $2B. This funding round for Spyke breaks records as the largest seed round raised by a female CEO in Turkey as well as globally in the mobile gaming industry.
Due to officially launch their first game within a month, Spyke Games focuses on the mobile gaming market, which is the fastest growing industry segment, with $136B in gross bookings, according to IDG Consulting. Mobile gaming is estimated to grow 248 per cent in the next 10 years, according to Newzoo.
Spyke’s Global Gaming Leadership
The co-founding team includes five gaming industry leaders who have built teams and developed many of the world’s top grossing global mobile titles which collectively amassed 9.5M DAU (daily active users) and $1B in revenue to date. The Spyke co-founding team were co-founders or executive team members at Peak Games, Zynga and Riot Games and include: CEO Rina Onur Sirinoglu, COO Remi Onur, CPO Barkin Basaran, CTO Fuat Coşkun and CMO Mithat Madra.
“Spyke Games’ phenomenal team came together after working at companies like Peak Games, Zynga and Riot Games where we identified significant opportunities emerging over the past 12 years in the social, mobile casual-games genre. We’re creating world-class games that connect and delight people, title-after-title. And we know we can achieve this through our company culture, relentless focus on quality and inspiring joyful, emotional experiences,” said Spyke Games CEO, Peak Games former co-founder and 500 Istanbul founding partner Rina Onur Sirinoglu.
A games industry leader and business builder, Sirinoglu added, “With two decades investing in gaming and entertainment, Griffin Gaming Partners provides Spyke with the best experience and connections in the industry resulting in significant growth opportunities. We’re inspired by Griffin’s confidence in our team and initial game as well as their willingness to jump in and help us take our venture to the next level.”
Griffin Gaming Partners is one of the world’s largest venture capital firms singularly focused on investing in the global gaming market. GGP invests in gaming content and infrastructure companies as well as Web3 gaming-related companies, with notable investments in Discord, Forte, AppLovin, Overwolf and WinZO.
“Spyke has the perfect combination of a deeply experienced team with proven success developing games and an unwavering focus on execution,” said Griffin Gaming partner’s MD Phil Sanderson, who is also a member of Spyke’s board of directors.
Spyke will use the funds to focus on the launch and continuous improvement of its initial game as well as to hire top talent from Turkey’s thriving technology and gaming ecosystem. According to Startups Watch, in 2021 Turkish startups raised a record $1.4B, and gaming startups raised more than $400M increasing the gaming talent pool.
