Veloxia raises $3 million to expand beyond idle mobile games

Veloxia has raised $3 million in funding to make idle games for mobile devices. It already has one hit with the strategy idle game dubbed Space Colony: Idle on iOS and Android.

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 when you have a lot of idle time, and they’re often quite repetitive, where you tap the screen repeatedly.

Origins

Above: Veloxia’s founders have raised $4 million to date.

Tugay Alyıldız, Melih Gündoğdu, and Mehveş Altay started the company in June 2019 with the mission of creating innovative products on a global scale in mobile gaming. Veloxia published its first product, an idle game called “Space Colony: Idle” on iOS and Android platforms in late 2019, and it has been ranked among the top strategy games and achieved nearly a million downloads.

The trio started the company to create multiplayer games that can spread in a viral fashion with more efficient marketing and high profitability. The company wants to build a portfolio of games across a variety of genres. Alyildiz has experience in consulting, strategy, investment, and finance. Gündoğdu, chief operating officer, is 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 Tugay Alyildiz, CEO of Veloxia, in an email to GamesBeat. “We work towards 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 muscle, 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

Above: Veloxia’s Space Colony: Idle game.

Image Credit: Veloxia

Görkem Oktay, general partner at Collective Spark, said in a statement that Turkey has been at the forefront of mobile gaming with many successful startups and multiple exits in recent years. In this context, he said his firm has been closely following the landscape for a long time and invested in the Veloxia team which he has known since inception. He said he looks forward to Veloxia publishing new games in various categories.

Alyıldız noted that he will be attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this year on behalf of Veloxia to help raise awareness of Veloxia 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.