Mission Control Games Launches with $4 Million to Reinvent Casual Mobile Gaming
- ByStartupStory | April 15, 2026
Founded by veterans of the Merge Dragons team, the London-Istanbul studio wants to build games that feel alive — using AI to move faster and think bigger.
The casual mobile gaming market is one of the largest entertainment categories on the planet, yet for years it has largely recycled the same mechanics, formats, and formulas. A new studio thinks there’s far more creative territory left to explore — and has just secured the backing to prove it.
Mission Control Games, a mobile game studio focused on the casual puzzle genre, has announced its launch alongside the close of a $4 million pre-seed funding round, led by General Catalyst, with participation from Arcadia Gaming Partners and e2vc.
The Team Behind the Studio
The people building Mission Control Games aren’t newcomers to the space. The studio was co-founded by Kıvanç Okutur (CEO) and Murat Gürel (CTO), both veterans of the team behind the widely popular casual gaming title Merge Dragons. Having seen firsthand what it takes to build a game that reaches millions of players, the two are now setting their sights on something more ambitious — creating entirely new sub-genres rather than iterating on what already exists.
Headquartered across London and Istanbul, Mission Control Games aims to create engaging puzzle experiences that balance familiarity with innovation.
The Ambition: Small Team, Massive Scale
What makes Mission Control Games an interesting founder story isn’t just the product vision — it’s the philosophy behind how the studio intends to operate. Okutur has drawn inspiration from an unlikely source: Conway’s Game of Life, the mathematical concept where deceptively simple rules give rise to endlessly complex and dynamic outcomes. He noted that while casual gaming attracts the largest audiences, it still offers significant untapped opportunities for innovation.
The goal is to translate that principle into game design — building experiences that feel fresh and alive, not just functional.
“We want to move fast using emerging capabilities of AI and build games that feel alive. Our ambition is to become the largest mobile gaming company with the smallest team,” Okutur says.
It’s a bold statement, but one that reflects a broader shift happening across the games industry — where AI-assisted development is beginning to compress timelines and flatten the advantage that large studios once held over small, focused teams.
Building New Sub-Genres, Not Copying Old Ones
Operating within the casual gaming segment, the studio seeks to explore new design approaches and develop original sub-genres rather than replicate existing formats. Speed and iteration are central to its development process, enabling the team to rapidly test and refine game concepts while leveraging emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence.
This kind of intentional sub-genre creation — rather than chasing proven formulas — is a riskier bet, but potentially a far more rewarding one. The studios that defined categories like match-3, merge, and idle games didn’t just build popular titles; they built entire ecosystems of copycat products around them. Mission Control Games is explicitly aiming for that kind of category-defining output.
What’s Next
The company will use the new funding to grow the team and accelerate development of the studio’s first title. Details on the game itself remain under wraps for now, but with General Catalyst leading the round — a firm not typically known for early-stage gaming bets — it signals that investors see something more than just another mobile studio in the making.
For the startup ecosystem watching the intersection of AI and entertainment, Mission Control Games is one to watch. If the founders can carry the instincts they built at Merge Dragons into an entirely new creative framework, the casual gaming space may be about to get a lot more interesting.
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