Turkey-based Dream Games, which makes the popular mobile game Royal Match, raises $155M Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Makers Fund at a $1B valuation
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Four months after Index Ventures led what was then the largest Series A any Turkish startup had raised, Dream Games is back with a $155M Series B valuing the Royal Match studio at $1B — this time co-led by Index and games specialist Makers Fund. The velocity is the story: a $50M debut in March, a unicorn price by June.
That pace turned Dream Games into the template for an Istanbul match-3 wave that followed it: Good Job Games, TaleMonster, and Grand Games all raised against the same playbook, and by 2025 the asset class had grown big enough to pull in CVC and Blackstone at a reported ~$5B.
First-order effects
- Index Ventures doubles down within a quarter, moving from sole lead on the record Turkish Series A to co-leading this round with Makers Fund — conviction priced at a $1B valuation for a single-title studio.
- Dream Games gets $155M of runway while Royal Match is hot, letting it compete for players against established match-3 incumbents before the franchise's momentum fades.
Second-order effects
- Local founders copy the blueprint: Good Job Games raises a $60M Series A for Match Villains, and TaleMonster and Grand Games follow with their own institutional rounds — global funds now underwriting Istanbul puzzle studios as a category.
- Capital migrates up the maturity curve: once the $1B-to-$2.75B step-up lands via the $255M January 2022 round, the asset becomes legible to non-venture buyers, culminating in CVC and Blackstone's $2B-plus minority stake at roughly $5B.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Turkey solidifies as an export engine for hit-driven puzzle studios whose later rounds are set by private equity rather than VCs — a structure where Balderton's $70M Series B for Grand Games is the mid-market echo of Dream Games' trajectory.
- Single-franchise mobile studios become a distinct late-stage asset class: durable retention economics justify PE-scale checks, compressing the gap between a seed-stage game and a multi-billion-dollar private holding.
The trend: Istanbul's hit-driven mobile puzzle studios are scaling from venture rounds into private-equity-scale stakes as single-franchise economics prove durable.