Veloxia has raised $3 million in funding to make idle games for mobile devices. It already has one hit, Space Colony: Idle on iOS and Android.
The Istanbul-based Veloxia is the latest Turkish game company to raise a significant round of money. In mobile games, Turkey is starting to become so hot that you could compare it to Finland, which gave birth to gaming companies such as Supercell and Rovio. In recent years, Turkish game companies have also become hot commodities, with Zynga acquiring Peak Games last year for $1.8 billion.
Collective Spark led the round, with participation from Bogazici Ventures, Ak Portfoy Girisim Sermayesi, and several angel investors. Idle games are titles that you play that don’t always require your full focus, and they’re often quite repetitive, where you tap the screen many times.
Origins
Tugay Alyıldız, Melih Gündoğdu, and Mehveş Altay started the company in June 2019 to create innovative products on a global scale in mobile gaming. Veloxia published Space Colony: Idle in late 2019, and it has been ranked among the top strategy games and achieved nearly a million downloads.
The company wants to build a portfolio of games across a variety of genres. Alyildiz has experience in consulting, strategy, investment, and finance. Gündoğdu is the chief operating officer and a management engineering graduate, with experience in consulting, strategy, investment finance. And Altay is the chief technology officer.
“Our infrastructure is backed by behavioral economy models which we are constantly developing as we scale our products,” said Alyildiz in an email to GamesBeat. “We work toward differentiating Veloxia from other mobile gaming startups with our approach to monetization in game design and by successfully managing products in different categories under a cluster structure.”
He said the funding round will help the company put its idle know-how to work, further strengthen its analytics capabilities, and expand across strategy and action game categories.
Alyildiz said that the development team has been growing under the leadership of Altay, who worked for Microsoft and Google in several countries during her college years. She said the company has an international team with 22 members living in different geographies. The company will expand in Turkey and aboard and maintain its inclusive and diverse team culture.
Big ambitions
Alyıldız noted that he will be attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this year on behalf of Veloxia to help raise the company’s presence in the mobile game community.
The company is currently working on a title in the multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBA) category. The hope is to produce the biggest game out of Turkey and to expand its overseas team and open North Europe offices. The company has raised almost $4 million to date.