Cheer Games, a next-generation mobile puzzle studio, has raised $4.5 million to make puzzle games.
Cheer’s funding follows another funding Vento Games raised $4 million yesterday. In the case of Vento Games, the company is based in Turkiye, a mobile gaming powerhouse. While Cheer’s team is from Turkiye, it is based in Barcelona, another mobile gaming hub.
Cheer was founded by former senior leaders at AppLovin’s Lion Studios, where they were the creators of the top-grossing hit Hexa Sort. Makers Fund led the pre-seed round, with participation from Play Ventures and a strategic group of angel investors.
The funding will accelerate development of Cheer’s upcoming slate of games and expand its Barcelona headquarters with new global talent.
Cheer’s founding team, CEO Emre Gercel, CPO Berkay Ozturk, CTO Ertan Ünver and CMO
Kutay Koralturk, has worked together for years, shipping top-grossing titles such as Hexa
Sort, which surpassed $50 million in in-app purchase revenue alone. They built deep expertise across product, growth and business development. Drawing on that experience, they founded Cheer Games to focus on durable, scalable puzzle IP, aiming to build long-lived puzzle franchises through disciplined product execution.
“When I look across the table at Berkay, Kutay, and Ertan, I see the people who built the
games our industry measures itself against and who chose to bet on what comes next,” said Gercel, CEO of Cheer Games, in a statement. “Berkay’s design vision built Hexa Sort into a top-grossing sort game in the world which the industry is still catching up. Kutay didn’t just scale games, he scaled the machine that scales games.”
Gercel added, “Ertan built not one but two successful studios from scratch. That collective
experience is not something you find twice. We started Cheer because we believed we could build something more durable than the industry’s short-term thinking allows for. To build games that become franchises and studios that become institutions. Barcelona gives us the global stage, our Turkish roots give us the hunger, and this team gives me complete
confidence that we’ll deliver.”
Headquartered in Barcelona, the studio is building a focused, high-talent-density organization with talent from leading European gaming companies. Cheer Games has
already assembled an 11 person team with deep roots in the mobile industry, and is actively hiring.
“From the first time we met the team, the chemistry between the founders was absolutely
contagious,” Curtis Urbanowicz, investor at Makers Fund, in a statement. “They all fed off each other’s energy and expertise as they clearly shared the same vision and philosophy for their studio. The Cheer team has shown they can create fresh game concepts and then build the depth that keeps players coming back. We’re confident they can continue this with their new studio and we’re thrilled to be a part of their journey!”
“Truly complete founding teams are rare, but the Cheer founders cover every discipline that defines a top-tier game studio, from product and design to engineering, growth and live ops,” said Anton Backman, General Partner at Play Ventures, in a statement. “At Play, we believe that succeeding in today’s market requires an innate understanding of the category you’re building in, and the Cheer team has demonstrated exactly that through Hexa Sort. That recent, battle-tested experience, combined with their ambition to build enduring games, gives them a meaningful edge from day one.”