Cheer Games Raises $4.5 Million Pre-Seed Round Led by Makers Fund to Build Mobile Game Franchises in Barcelona
TL;DR
- Barcelona-based mobile studio Cheer Games has raised $4.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Makers Fund with Play Ventures, with funding earmarked for developing its upcoming game slate and expanding its Barcelona headquarters with global talent.
- The studio was founded by former Lion Studios leads and the creators of Hexa Sort, one of the most commercially successful sort games in mobile gaming history, bringing deep AppLovin ecosystem experience to an independent venture.
Cheer Games has secured its first major external funding, closing a $4.5 million pre-seed round led by Makers Fund with participation from Play Ventures. The Barcelona-based studio, founded by former Lion Studios leads and the team behind Hexa Sort, is using the capital to develop its next slate of games and grow its 11-person team through international hiring.
The founding credentials here are worth paying attention to. Hexa Sort, the sort mechanic puzzle game developed before Cheer's founding, reached the top of global grossing charts in its category and generated the kind of benchmark data that the broader mobile industry referenced when evaluating sort games as a genre. Building a chart-topping mobile title is one thing. Building one that becomes a genre reference point is considerably rarer.
CEO Emre Gercel was candid about what the team around him represents: "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. 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. Ertan built not one but two successful studios from scratch. That collective experience is not something you find twice."
He also framed the studio's founding philosophy in terms that go beyond a single hit: "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."
The Turkish founding team operating out of Barcelona is a combination that has produced meaningful results elsewhere in mobile gaming. Barcelona's creative and technology ecosystem gives access to European talent markets while the team's background in Turkish mobile development connects Cheer to one of the most commercially productive gaming cultures globally.
Makers Fund leading the round is a credible institutional signal, the same firm that recently backed Vento Games' seed round and has built a deliberate position across mobile gaming's next generation of founder-led studios.
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