Year: 2019

AI training data provider Samasource has raised a $14.8 million Series A funding round led by Ridge Ventures.

The San Francisco headquartered company delivers Fortune 100 companies with the inputs they need for machine learning development in fields including autonomous transportation, e-commerce and robotics.

And it does so with a global work-force of data-specialists, a large number of whom are located in East Africa.

In addition to San Francisco, New York and the Hague, Samasource has offices and teams in Kenya and Uganda. The company has a global staff of 2900 and is the largest AI and data annotation employer in East Africa, according to CEO and founder Leila Janah.

As part of its Series A, Samasource opened an AI Development Center in Montreal, Canada and expanded its digital delivery center in Kampala, Uganda to serve its corporate client-base.

“Typically we’re working with very large companies for whom AI is a key part of their business strategy. So therefore they have to be really careful about…bias in the algorithms or bad data,” Janah explained on a call with TechCrunch.

Samasource works through a discovery phase with customers, to determine the problems their trying to solve, their sources of input data, and customizes an approach to providing what they need.

“In some cases we might refine elements of our software…then we go into deployment and…annotation work,” said Janah, referring to the company’s SamaHub training data platform.

Samasource clients include Google, Continental Tires, Walmart, and Ford. The company generates revenue primarily through its machine learning data annotation and validation services.

Samasource was originally founded by Janah as a non-profit in 2008. “I saw huge opportunity for tapping into the incredible depth of…talent in East Africa in the tech world,” she said of the firm’s origins.

She converted Samasource to for-profit status in 2019, making the previous non-profit organization a shareholder.

“As a CEO I need to make it clear to investors that this is an investible entity,” Jana said of the reason for Samasource becoming a private company.

Ridge Ventures Principal Ben Metcalfe confirmed the fund’s lead on Samasource’s $14.8 million Series A round and that he will take a board seat with the company. Other investors included, Social Impact Ventures, Bestseller Foundation, and Bluecrest Limited Capital.

Samasource’s founder believes that providing for-profit AI training data to global companies can be done while improving lives in East Africa.

“I strongly believe you can combine the highest quality of service with the core mission of altruism,” she said.

“A big part of our values is offering living wages and creating dignified technology work for people. We hire people from low-income backgrounds and offer them training in AI and machine learning. And our teams achieve above the industry standard.”

It’s not unusual for Samasource to hear comparisons to Andela, the well-funded tech talent accelerator that trains and connects African developers to global companies.

“We are very different in that our whole model is about delivering high-quality training data. I would call Samasource an AI company and Andela a software training company,” she said.

Janah does see some parallels, however, in both companies’ recognizing and building tech-talent in Africa, along with a number of blue-chip entrants.

“I think it’s telling that Facebook, IBM and Google have all opened tech hubs in Africa, some of them AI or machine-learning focused,” she said.

Some Samasource professionals are also taking their skills on to other endeavors in Africa’s innovation ecosystem.

“A lot of our alums go on to do entrepreneurial things [and] start businesses and I think you’re going to see a lot more of that as we grown,” said Janah.

For now she will be the one hiring and training new tech workers in East Africa.

As part of its Series A, Samasource increased employees in Kampala to 90 people and plans to grow that by 150 percent in 2020, its CEO said.

Starburst, the company that’s looking to monetize the open-source Presto distributed query engine, today announced that it has raised a $22 million funding round led by Index Ventures, with the firm’s partner Mike Volpi joining the board. The general idea behind Presto is to allow anybody to use the standard SQL query language to run interactive queries against a vast amount of data that can sit in a variety of sources.

Like so many other open-source companies, Starburst plans to monetize Presto, which was originally developed at Facebook and open-sourced in 2013, by adding a number of enterprise-centric features on top, with the obvious focus being security features like role-based access control, as well as connectors to enterprise systems like Teradata, Snowflake and DB2, and a management console where users can configure the cluster to auto-scale, for example.

The Starburst co-founders, Justin Borgman and Matt Fuller previously sold their “SQL-on-Hadoop” company Hadapt to Teradata. After their tenure at Teradata, they decided to focus on turning Presto into an enterprise-grade service and after a few years, they succeeded in hiring Preso founders Brian Sundstrom, Martin Traverso and Dave Philips, as well.

“What makes Presto so interesting is that it allows you to do data warehouse analytics without the data warehouse,” Starburst CEO Borgman told me. “What I mean by that is that you can query data anywhere. You don’t have to load the data, you don’t have to transform the data, and you don’t have to prepare the data.”

With this, an analyst can then access data anywhere, using regular SQL queries, without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure that makes it all work.

Starburst’s overall mission to unify all of these data sources may sound a bit familiar, and I’ve heard somewhat similar pitches from other companies as well, including the likes of Databricks. Borgman, however, argues, that Starburst’s target audience is quite different from that of other projects, which tend to sit on top of the Spark engine. “We see Spark as very complementary to Presto,” he said. “What I mean by that is, we really think that Spark is best for the data scientist who is training machine learning models and working with Python notebooks, and writing code in Scala. Sort of the AI use cases. We’re focused exclusively on SQL — and SQL is a language that caters to a much broader audience. Maybe it’s not the data scientist PhD, but it’s the business analyst, the guy who went to business school and is trying to create some charts to show what’s going on with sales.”

The company says it will use the new funding to build out its salesforce and marketing team, which it doesn’t really have right now, and expand its engineering team. Like similar open-source companies, chances are Starburst will, sooner or later, offer Presto as a managed service, too, though Borgman wasn’t quite ready to talk about this yet.

“Index has a long history of backing open source companies and data infrastructure companies. Some of these have now become household name:  MySQL, Elastic, Confluent, Datadog and Kong to name a few,” Index Venture’s Volpi writes in a bog post today. That already made Starburst a good fit for a potential investment, though he also notes that bringing the Presto founders on board helped seal the deal and something he helped engineer.

“Our great fortune was that Justin and Matt are immensely wise and able to put aside ego’s and short term personal gain,” writes Volpi. “We were excited when they came to terms with Dain, Martin, and Dave. The end result was a reborn Starburst — a company constituted of the entrepreneurs that seized the commercial opportunity of Presto and the genius founders who invented it in the first place.”

We’re ramping up the number of guest posts we publish on Extra Crunch so we can expand our coverage of fundraising, growth, hiring and emerging technology trends. This change is a direct response to our readers; many subscribers have been requesting additional how-to articles, and we hear you.

We also want to help recurring columnists improve their writing so they can reach more people on an ongoing basis. To this end, we’re offering additional editing support, publishing at least one-third of their columns on TechCrunch in front of the paywall and giving them extra consideration for stage time at Disrupt and other conferences. Going forward, the main way for contributors to publish on TechCrunch will be to also publish on Extra Crunch.

To submit a guest post or query, or if you have questions, email guestcolumns@techcrunch.com.

We’re still happy to run one-off columns on Extra Crunch if they are compelling to startup founders. And, we will still run one-off guest columns every so often on TechCrunch (in front of the paywall), but these are intended to be of a clear public-interest nature. While we’ve experimented with a wide range of approaches to columns over the years, the core value we provide is from our own work.

Why submit a guest post?

Authors have a lot of leeway to explore topics in depth. And because we’re writing for an informed audience, we encourage more length than may be normal on other sites, so 1000 to 2000 words is average.

If you have experience that might help someone else in your situation, consider turning it into a guest post — it’s good to share what you know, and it’s a solid way to establish yourself as a thought leader.

How to pitch a story

Email a complete draft of your guest post to guestcolumns@techcrunch.com, or send us a detailed summary that explains why your post would be of interest to our audience.

We receive a high volume of submissions, so it may take some time to respond; generally speaking, you can expect to receive a reply within a week.

It’s fine if you work with a PR agency or are submitting a post on someone else’s behalf, but the post’s author needs to be copied on our email communications.

Things to keep in mind when writing a guest post

Please link back to external sources to make it easier for us to fact-check. It’s okay to mention your work, but don’t make your guest post too self-promotional — talk about your experience, not your company.

For Extra Crunch articles, a paywall is placed after the first few hundred words of the article body, so give the reader a summary of the key information in the beginning of your post.

If we publish your article

Each post we accept goes is edited before publishing to bring it into our house style, but most changes are minimal. We’ll also ask you to update your Crunchbase profile (if you have one), and will request a one-sentence biography that will appear at the top of your post.

What happens after your story runs?

Authors are free to republish the full text of their guest post anywhere one week after we run it, as long as they link back to and mention the original story. Because photos and images are licensed by TechCrunch, only the text of your guest post can be redistributed unless you’ve supplied images you own the rights to.

After we’ve published your article, we’ll send you a link. If your post appeared on Extra Crunch, we’ll send you a PDF version with the full text.

Expect to hear “no”

Don’t be discouraged, but we’re very selective about what we publish, which means we turn down the overwhelming majority of submissions and queries.

---

To submit a guest post or query, or if you have questions, email guestcolumns@techcrunch.com.

Sleep is big business. Casper, Leesa and a dozen other mattress companies have driven the point home in recent years. It’s something we all want, but none of us are getting enough of. In 2017, sleep aids generated $69.5 billion, globally. By 2023, that number is expected to blow past $101 billion.

Remrise is the latest startup in search of the Holy Grail of a better night’s sleep. The company’s already raised $8.2 million in seed funding led by Founders Fund to kickstart that effort. Fostered by Atomic, the same incubator that gave the world Hims/Hers, the startup delivers herbal sleep solutions, tailored to the user.

The goal of the service is to move users off medicated sleep aids, using a combination of traditional herbal supplements and improvements to sleep hygiene. “We’re creating an app that is tracking and analyzing data,” CEO and founder Veronica Lee tells TechCrunch. “So we’re going to connect to any existing trackers to understand your bedtime, wake time, REM cycles. We’re collecting that passive data, and we’re also working with the customer around collecting active data around choices. The goal is to help the consumer improve sleep hygiene over time.”

The company has already launched a pilot with 90 users and plans to expand it to a larger study of about 400 people, using both sleep trackers (like Fitbits or Apple Watches) and sleep clinics. In the meantime, however, it’s already launching for the public.

There’s a 14-point questionnaire on Remrise’s site aimed at getting users started. I filled it out and the startup suggested the “Rested Up” mix, featuring Spirit Poria (Fu Shen), Salvia Root (Dan Shen), Polygala (Yuan Zhi), Shi Chang Pu, GABA, Magnesium and Valerian Root. Results will vary.

“Each formation has about a dozen to 15 different ingredients. We’re tailoring it to the individual. When people go through the quiz, we’re basing the patterns off of traditional Chinese medicine patterns. Each profile type goes through four different patterns that rotate on a daily basis.”

The company is offering a “free trial” for a week, which requires the user to pay shipping. Those interested in the full service deal will be charged $55 a month.

The future of the connected home, connected car, and connected everything will have a lot of imaging technology at the center of it: sensors to track the movement of people and things will be a critical way for AI brains to figure out what to do next. Now, with a large swing towards more data protection — in part a reaction to the realization of just how much information about us is being picked up — we’re starting to see some interesting solutions emerge that can still provide that imaging piece, but with privacy in mind. Today one of the startups building such solutions is announcing a big round of funding.

Vayyar, an Israeli startup that builds radar-imaging chips and sensors as well as the software that reads and interprets the resulting images which is used in automotive and IoT applications (among others) — providing accurate information about what is going on a specific place, even if it’s behind a wall or another object, but without the kind of granular detail that would actually be able to personally identify someone — has picked up $109 million, money that it will use to expand the range of applications that it can cover and to double down on key markets like the US and China.

From what I understand from sources close to the deal, this round is being done at a valuation “north” of $600 million, which is a big step up on the company’s valuation in its C-round in 2017, which was at around $245 million post-money, according to PitchBook data.

Part of the reason for the big multiple is because the company already has a number of big customers on its books, including the giant automotive supplier Valeo and what Raviv Melamed — Vayyar’s co-founder, CEO and chairman — described to me as a “major Silicon Valley company” working on using Vayyar’s technology in its smart home business.

I was going to write that the funding is notable for the large size, but it feels these days that $100 million is the new $50 million (which is to say, it’s becoming a lot more common to raise so much). What’s perhaps more notable is the source of the funding. The Series D is being led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, with Regal Four and existing investors including Battery Ventures, Bessemer Ventures, ICV, ITI, WRVI Capital, Claltech all also participating. The total raised by the startup now stands at $188 million.

Koch Disruptive Technologies is the venture arm of Koch Industries, the multinational giant that works across a range of oil and gas, manufacturing, ranching and other industries. It’s founded by the Koch brothers, Charles and the late David, who are mostly known in popular culture for their strong support of right-wing politicians, businesses and causes. It’s an image that hasn’t really helped the VC arm and its partners seem to be trying to downplay it these days.

Putting that to one side, the Vayyar investment has a lot of potential applicability across the many industries where Koch has holdings.

“Advancements in imaging sensors are vital as technology continues to disrupt all aspects of society,” said Chase Koch, president of Koch Disruptive Technologies. “We see incredible potential in combining Vayyar’s innovative technology and principled leadership team with Koch’s global reach and capabilities to create breakthroughs in a wide range of industries.”

Over the last several years, the startup has indeed been working on a number of ways of applying its technology on behalf of clients, who in turn develop ways of productising it. There are a few exceptions where Vayyar itself has built ways of using its tech in direct consumer products: for example, the Walabot, a hand-held sensor that works in conjunction with a normal smartphone to give people the ability to, say, detect if a pipe is leaking behind a wall.

But for the most part, Melamed says that its focus has been on building technology for others to use. These have, for example, included in-car imaging sensors that can detect who is sitting where and what is going on inside the vehicle, useful for example for making sure that no one is dangerously blocking an airbag, or accidentally setting off a seatbelt alarm when not actually in a seat, or (in the case of a sleeping baby) being left behind on accident creating potentially dire outcomes.

Regulations will make having better safety detection a must over time, Melamed noted, and more immediately, “By 2022-2023 it will be a must for all new cars to be able to detect [the presence of babies getting left behind when you leave the car] if you want to have a five-star safety rating.”

The focus (no pun intended) on privacy is a somewhat secondary side-effect of what Vayyar has built to date, but that same swing of regulation is likely to continue to put it into the fore, and make it as much of a feature as the imaging detection itself.

Vayyar is not the only company using radar to build up better imaging intelligence: Entropix, Photonic Vision, Noitom Technology and Aquifi and ADI are among the many companies also building imaging solutions based on the same kind of technology. Melamed says that this is where the company’s software and algorithms help it to stand out.

“I think when you look at what we have developed for example for cars, these guys are far behind and it will take some time to close the gap,” he added.

 

Growing up, Selcuk Atli spent a good deal of his free time playing video games with his friends. And when I say with his friends, I mean actually with them. They’re called LAN parties, where everyone brings over their consoles and the group gets to play together virtually and in real life, all at the same time.

Atli, a grown man now, still loves games, but misses the memories made during LAN parties.

That’s how Bunch was born.

Bunch is a lot like Discord, but for mobile games. Users who download the game can connect with friends and join an audio or video chat with them. From there, users can choose a game to load and the whole party is instantly taken not just to the game, but into a multiplayer game session with their friends.

Today, Bunch has announced the close of a strategic investment round of $3.85 million from top game makers including Supercell, Tencent, Riot Games, Miniclip, and Colopl Next. Bunch’s previous investors include London Venture Partners, Founders Fund, Betaworks, Shrug Capital, North Zone, Streamlined Ventures, and 500 Startups.

Bunch has a handful of first-party games on its platform to ensure that new users have a starting off point. However, one of the biggest challenges of scaling is creating relationships with third-party game makers to eventually integrate that deep linking technology into the Bunch app.

With this new money, Bunch finds itself under the arm of a handful of some of the biggest mobile game publishers in the world. This new funding also brings Bunch’s total financing since launch to $8.5 million.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a company try to bring the nostalgia of 90s gaming into the 21st Century. Discord has made quite a name for itself in the gaming world with a platform that allows gamers to communicate before, during and after a game.

However, Discord is more targeted at PC gamers, and is meant to give users the chance to meet and communicate with other gamers, rather than just hopping on a call with existing friends.

TeaTime Live, founded by QuizUp founder Thor Friedricksein, is another competitor focused squarely on mobile. However, TeaTime Live is going hard into Snapchat-like filters and avatars for video chat. And, like Discord, TTL wants users to meet other gamers, not connect with their IRL friends.

Bunch is primarily focused on connecting gamers with their actual friends. Once you’ve both loaded into a game, Bunch keeps running in the background to power voice chat. By focusing on real friends, Atli believes that the impact of Bunch can be much greater for both users and the games themselves.

In fact, Atli says that user retention on a specific game grows 1.3 times with every new friend added on the platform. Indeed, between Day 7 and Day 30, Bunch Cohorts’ retention rates are 2x the retention of normal players, according to the Bunch CEO.

For now, Bunch is focused entirely on user acquisition and scaling to more games, but could see an opportunity to generate revenue through a subscription or in-app purchase model around premium Bunch features.

Founders First Capital Partners, an accelerator and investment firm which provides revenue-based financing to businesses led by “underrepresented entrepreneurs” operating in underserved markets, has received a $100 million commitment to expand its operations.

The San Diego-based investor raised the debt financing from Community Investment Management, a large debt-focused impact investment fund.

The revenue-based financing model is a new one that several startups are beginning to explore as a way to take non-dilutive capital for early stage businesses that might not qualify for traditional bank loans.

Companies like the new media startup, The Prepared, which offers tips on disaster preparedness, used revenue financing as a way to get its own business off the ground. And other companies are turning to the financing method too, according to investors from Lighter Capital.

At Founders First Capital Partners, the new financing will expand its lending operations to companies that are already generating between $1 million and $5 million in annual revenue.

The new program is set to launch in January 2020, expanding the firm’s footprint as a financial services firm for minority and other underrepresented founders, the company said in a statement.

The firm focuses on businesses led by people of color, women, and military veterans and concentrates on entrepreneurs whose business operate in low and middle-income communities outside of the traditional funding networks of Silicon Valley and New York, the company said.

It also operates an accelerator program for entrepreneurs that meet the same criteria.

At its Cloud Next event in London, Google today announced a number of product updates around its managed Anthos platform, as well as Apigee and its Cloud Code tools for building modern applications that can then be deployed to Google Cloud or any Kubernetes cluster.

Anthos is one of the most important recent launches for Google, as it expands the company’s reach outside of Google Cloud and into its customers’ data centers and, increasingly, edge deployments. At today’s event, the company announced that it is taking Anthos Migrate out of beta and into general availability. The overall idea behind Migrate is that it allows enterprises to take their existing, VM-based workloads and convert them into containers. Those machines could come from on-prem environments, AWS, Azure or Google’s Compute Engine, and — once converted — can then run in Anthos GKE, the Kubernetes service that’s part of the platform.

“That really helps customers think about a leapfrog strategy, where they can maintain the existing VMs but benefit from the operational model of Kubernetes,” Google Engineering Director Jennifer Lin told me. “So even though you may not get all of the benefits of a cloud-native container day one, what you do get is consistency in the operational paradigm.”

As for Anthos itself, Lin tells me that Google is seeing some good momentum. The company is highlighting a number of customers at today’s event, including Germany’s Kaeser Kompressoren and Turkey’s Denizbank.

Lin noted that a lot of financial institutions are interested in Anthos. “A lot of the need to do data-driven applications, that’s where Kubernetes has really hit that sweet spot because now you have a number of distributed datasets and you need to put a web or mobile front end on [them],” she explained. “You can’t do it as a monolithic app, you really do need to tap into a number of datasets — you need to do real-time analytics and then present it through a web or mobile front end. This really is a sweet spot for us.”

Also new today is the general availability of Cloud Code, Google’s set of extensions for IDEs like Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ that helps developers build, deploy and debug their cloud-native applications more quickly. The idea, here, of course, is to remove friction from building containers and deploying them to Kubernetes.

In addition, Apigee hybrid is now also generally available. This tool makes it easier for developers and operators to manage their APIs across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, a challenge that is becoming increasingly common for enterprises. This makes it easier to deploy Apigee’s API runtimes in hybrid environments and still get the benefits of Apigees monitoring and analytics tools in the cloud. Apigee hybrid, of course, can also be deployed to Anthos.

Can cloud kitchens take off in India? Swiggy, one of the country’s largest food delivery startups, is betting on it. The Prosus Ventures-backed startup said on Wednesday it has established 1,000 cloud kitchens for its restaurant partners in the country.

The Bangalore-headquartered firm said it has invested in over a million square feet of real estate space across 14 cities in the country over the last two years to help restaurant partners of all sizes expand to more locations both within their city and across new cities through cloud kitchens.

Swiggy said it has already invested about $24.5 million in its cloud kitchens business that it calls Swiggy Access, and plans to pump another $10.5 million into it by March next year.

Compared to developed nations like Japan and the U.S., India remains a very underpenetrated market for restaurants. “Even in dense areas, you know you need more restaurants,” said Larry Illg, chief executive of Prosus Ventures, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“That’s the value of creating kitchens for delivery platforms. We have the visibility of all the market dynamics. We can look at a location, comb through the data and know what kind of restaurants and food supplies would work there. Over time, you come to realize the neighborhood and their collective behaviour,” he said.

That’s where cloud kitchens could help. For restaurateurs, cloud kitchens reduce the risk when they look for expansion. “You have figured out the menu, and you know the operations. But you still have to take a big real estate risk when picking the location. Kitchens allow them to de-risk all these factors,” said Illg.

Early signs show that the concept of cloud kitchens is working for Swiggy Access partners. The company said one in three partners has been able to expand to a second kitchen within 90 days of signing up. Many restaurants from smaller cities have also expanded into big cities, the startup said.

Raymond Andrews, founder and chief executive of Biryani Blues, said in a statement that Swiggy Access has enabled the eatery to “expand quickly into newer territories not just in Delhi-NCR but also to Chandigarh. In the six years of our existence, I have found Access to be the easiest way to expand my brand. It’s a game-changer for the industry.”

Swiggy believes that India could emerge as the second-highest number of cloud kitchens after China in the coming years, said Vishal Bhatia, CEO of New Supply business at the firm. A year ago, the company had just 200 cloud kitchen partners.

“The milestone of Swiggy successfully creating over 1000 partner kitchens shows the faith the restaurant partners have in the concept and bolsters our pioneering efforts in enabling more success stories in the restaurant ecosystem,” he said.

Swiggy is also betting that cloud kitchens will help it speed up the delivery time. Swiggy co-founder and chief executive Sriharsha Majety said last month that the company is quickly scaling up “pods” that house cloud kitchens for restaurants in a way that they are “within a 10-minute reach of 99% of their consumers.”

Swiggy added that it is on track to create 15,000 new direct or indirect jobs in the restaurant industry through its Access program by next six months.

The announcement today comes weeks after news broke that Travis Kalanick, founder and former chief executive of Uber, is buying up cheap properties in India and some other markets to scale his cloud kitchens venture.

Indian newspaper Economic Times reported earlier this month that Ashish Saxena, former India head of TexMex Cuisine, franchisee for American casual dining restaurant chain Chili’s Grill & Bar in the country, is working with Kalanick on CloudKitchens, the new venture.

Food delivery firm FoodPanda, owned by ride-hailing giant Ola, earlier this year also pivoted to cloud kitchens.

Dream Games, a Turkish mobile gaming company founded by former Peak Games employees who worked together on hit puzzle games Toy Blast and Toon Blast, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding.

Leading the round is Makers Fund, with co-investment from London’s Balderton Capital. The funding will be used to increase headcount within the Dream Games team, targeting 20 employees in year one.

The company — which is yet to launch a product — is co-founded by CEO Soner Aydemir, the former Product Director at Peak Games. The rest of the Dream Games team are Ikbal Namli and Hakan Saglam (former Peak Games engineering leads), Eren Sengul (former Peak Games product manger), and Serdar Yilmaz (former Peak Games 3D artist).

“Most of the [mobile games] companies believe that the market is saturated, but we believe there are still huge opportunities in the casual puzzle market,” Aydemir tells TechCrunch. “There are too many mediocre mobile games, but players deserve better. We see that there are still millions of players waiting for new, well-designed and enjoyable puzzle games, and we are committed to creating great games to meet players’ expectations”.

Aydemir says Dream Games doesn’t believe in a “hit-or-miss approach” to game development. Instead, he frames the studio’s strategy as “evolution over innovation” and “execution over ideas”. This will see it develop a first flagship title that can be iterated over the long term.

“We plan to fix the pain points for players in existing games,” he says. “Our experience makes us confident we can build something truly global by focusing on a single high-quality, long-standing game instead of multiple flash-in-the-pan titles. We’d rather people were loyally playing our one game for 10 years than losing interest every six months when something new comes along”.

With regards to audience, Aydemir says Dream Games is targeting players over the age of 25 in U.S., Canada and Europe. He pegs gender distribution at 65% female and 35% male. “Our players can be from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, but they are mainly average people who have routine lives,” he says.

Aydemir is also keen to flag up the burgeoning gaming sector in Turkey, which he claims is positioned to be one of the world’s leading ecosystems for mobile games.

In 2017, Peak Games, based in Istanbul, sold its card and board games studio to mobile gaming giant Zynga for $100 million. Zynga later opened a studio in the city and made further acquisitions, paying $250 million for Gram Games, the Turkish developers behind a number of popular puzzle titles. Other casual gaming studios with a presence in the region include Good Job Games, Ruby Games, Alictus, Rollic Games and Bigger Games.