We spoke with Jasper Brand, Partner at BITKRAFT, about the firm’s investment approach, what makes the Turkish gaming ecosystem stand out, the qualities it looks for in local studios, and the opportunities it sees beyond mobile gaming.
BITKRAFT is famously “built by founders for founders.” How does that operational background change how you support studios compared to a traditional VC?
We’re a people-first firm, and invest in exceptional builders. We see ourselves more on the same side of the table as founders, especially as partners from the earliest days.
We measure our founder NPS and actively evolve our processes to build the best product for founders, but also our LPs (similar to founders, we also have to fundraise). Ultimately, building BITKRAFT over the past almost-decade has been like building a startup from 3 to around 30 people across the globe, alongside a serial entrepreneur with a $1B exit under his belt.
Most of our team has a background in games, media, and tech. To enable a successful journey for studios, a deep understanding of making games and growing a game company with its outcome vectors makes a crucial difference: hiring, production, systems, distribution, publishing, and the fact that most great games look messy before they start working.
Together with a portfolio of ambitious builders and our strategic network, we change the kind of support we give. We help founders think through product, market, team, financing, and go-to-market, not just the deck. We also know when to be patient and when to be direct. Games aren’t linear businesses, and that operating knowledge matters enormously when you’re making early bets.
You can check the whole portfolio here
BITKRAFT has been expanding rapidly across Asia and other emerging markets. What makes the Turkish gaming ecosystem structurally different from those regions?
Türkiye has already produced globally relevant gaming outcomes – Peak, Dream, Gram – and that’s built something rare: institutionalized craft knowledge and a deep alumni network with proven ability to scale that keeps compounding.
In most emerging markets, the open question is whether local teams can build for a global audience. In Türkiye, that question is already answered.
We like to look at local cultures as accelerants for success. Here, the entrepreneurial hustle and work ethic is hardly matched anywhere else. A unique blend of creativity, high upside ambition, and pragmatic execution-mindedness comes together with an unrelenting competitive spirit.
The market is also structurally attractive for building new companies. There are real policy tailwinds around startups, support for user acquisition, favorable tax treatment, and development support that create an environment efficient for deploying capital at scale.
Your investment in Circle Games showed your confidence in the local scene. What should other Turkish mobile studios do or show to truly stand out to BITKRAFT?
Circle Games stood out because the team had a precise read on the market and moved fast, executing their first game at a high quality with initial metrics. The team had a strong bond since their university days, and came together after a decade of complementary game and studio leadership capabilities across disciplines.
While some strong studio outcomes are rooted in single-game success cases, more often than not, it requires several game launches with rapid iteration, building on prior learnings to then scale when things are working for a high-potential studio model.
In other words: It’s about whether a team can identify strong gameplay, test and iterate quickly, scale what’s working, and manage capital efficiently while doing it. Why are you the best team to go after this part of the games market? And this doesn’t necessarily mean fancy logos on the team slide.
With Circle Games, they showed outstanding operating discipline from the start. The team is lean and fast, and excelled on both product and distribution — that combination is rare. Plenty of studios can build a good game. Far fewer can build systems that extend beyond single games and turn early signals of new prototypes into a high-growth studio model. Fifteen months in, that’s exactly what we’ve seen play out — the execution capabilities we backed at seed have scaled with them.
The studios that stand out to us usually show three things: a team that has shipped or scaled before, differentiation in product, and an edge in distribution to have an edge in capitalizing on initial metrics indicating structural strength. Circle had all three, and it’s shown in how they’ve performed since.
While mobile is Türkiye’s strength, are you actively looking for Turkish teams building in PC/Console, AI gaming tools, or tech infrastructure?
Yes, we are actively looking for Turkish teams beyond mobile studios, incl. tech and infrastructure (we invested e.g. in Higgsfield and Inworld at Seed) and consumer companies (we invested e.g. in consumer fintech with Roundhill Investments and StockGro in their early days).
At BITKRAFT, we think of it as investing in the future of experience. That makes us open to all consumption and creation formats, as well as the enabling technologies behind them; the whole spectrum of connection and growth.
Türkiye has the talent base to expand beyond mobile games, and a young audience that’s digitally savvy, with over 90% of online purchases completed via mobile. Türkiye has been a long-standing powerhouse in fashion and ecommerce (6th largest apparel exporter globally, #1 in Europe for e-commerce growth), and a cultural exporter in linear media (third-largest exporter of TV series).
We’d actively like to see the next globally relevant ecommerce and fashion consumer company from Türkiye. In the age of AI, shopping will continue to evolve and initial novel startup approaches have emerged in recent years. Mobile studio startup pitches are disproportionately frequent for Türkiye. We’re still waiting to see more founders build across other categories.
While other hubs across the globe might have more prominent technical ecosystems, infrastructure or application layer companies could emerge from Türkiye, or Turkish diaspora (e.g., fal.ai with $4.5B valuation). The next phase is about taking bigger product risks while retaining the same execution discipline that made Turkish mobile studios world-class in the first place. Rapid iteration, customer validation, creative resonance, distribution skills, and a sky-is-the-limit mentality with hard work are core ingredients to entrepreneurial success in any category — or geography.
You’ve noted that gaming is moving toward creator-led ecosystems; do you see Turkish studios shifting from generic casual games into building true, long-term IP?
Yes, but I think this will take time. Turkish studios became globally respected because they mastered casual mobile games, which is a solid foundation for future growth.
Our thinking is that IP builds a distribution edge and real audience trust over time. Bigger outcomes will come from studios that can build worlds, characters, communities, and brands that players want to stay with for years, not weeks or months.
The opportunity is to combine Turkish execution speed with stronger IP thinking. The winners will be the teams that move from “we know how to build highly-tuned games” to “we know how to build ecosystems players care deeply about”.
What are BITKRAFT’s next plans for Türkiye?
Going back to the strong culture fit for entrepreneurial success, the plan is to keep spending time with founders in the ecosystem, build deeper local relationships, and meet the strongest teams early. We are interested in meeting exceptionally ambitious teams building studios or linear media companies, platforms, and enabling technologies, or category-defining consumer companies.
Partner at BITKRAFT Ventures
