Companies founded by Peak alumni who went on to start their own gaming ventures have raised a combined $914 million to date, as Türkiye's first unicorn appears to have made it easier for its former employees to secure funding
Teams that came out of Peak, Türkiye's first gaming unicorn – a startup valued at $1 billion or more – remain the most influential alumni network in the country's startup ecosystem.
Companies founded by people who left Peak to start their own gaming ventures have raised a total of $914 million to date, according to data from startups.watch, an Istanbul-based platform that tracks startup investments.
The amount dated Oct.15 puts numbers on the capital effect created by a team that was once raised under the roof of a single gaming company.
Success that built ecosystem
Peak was founded in 2010 and grew worldwide with games such as Toon Blast and Toy Blast.
Zynga, a U.S. mobile game publisher, acquired Peak outright for $1.8 billion, with $900 million paid in cash and $900 million in Zynga shares. It was the largest acquisition of a Turkish startup up to that point, and it made Peak the country's first unicorn.
Peak's real impact goes beyond the sale price. According to startups.watch's ecosystem map, 108 people who came out of Peak have founded 82 new startups, 37 of them directly in the gaming sector.
In startups.watch's first analysis in 2022, the network was smaller: 80 people who had passed through Peak had founded 65 different startups.
Over four years, both the number of people and the number of startups have grown markedly. The network is known as the "Peak Mafia," a nod to the "PayPal Mafia," the nickname for the group of founders who emerged from PayPal in the United States.
2 startups stand out
Two companies account for the bulk of the $914 million total.
Dream Games was founded in 2019 by former Peak employees Soner Aydemir, Ikbal Namlı, Hakan Sağlam, Eren Şengül and Serdar Yılmaz.
With Royal Match, the company has become one of the most important players in the mobile gaming market. Its valuation later rose to about $5 billion in a round joined by CVC, a private equity firm, and Blackstone, a U.S. investment firm.
Spyke Games, meanwhile, is led by CEO Rina Onur Şirinoğlu, one of Peak's co-founders, and is known for the fact that four of the five gaming professionals on its founding team came from Peak.
In 2022, the company received a $55 million seed investment led by Griffin Gaming Partners, then raised $50 million in rounds in both 2022 and 2024. Its total funding has reached about $105 million.
Together, the two companies come to roughly $573 million, which accounts for most of the $914 million figure. The remainder is spread across smaller studios founded by Peak alumni. One example is Ace Games, founded by Peak co-founder Hakan Baş, which raised $31.5 million.
Seed investing changed
The Peak network's contribution to the ecosystem is not limited to the headline total.
Dream Games raised $57.5 million before it even had a game. Spyke's $55 million seed round was considered a record in Türkiye at the time. Investors showed they were ready to commit early-stage capital at this scale to teams that had already helped produce a $1.8 billion exit.
The figure has another side: how the capital is distributed. According to an assessment compiling sector data, the top five best-funded gaming companies together raised more than $736 million. This raises the question of whether success is spreading to the broader base. Still, the size of the Peak network shows that experienced teams are boosting demand for newly founded studios.
Online shopping keeps families' home-work-school triangle intact
Add a grocery trip to the daily triangle of home, work and a child's school, and the shape becomes a rectangle. "Grocery Shopping and Time Perception Research," prepared by Getir, a Turkish rapid grocery delivery company, together with Data Institute, found that grocery shopping is not just about product prices. Time, transport, carrying, waiting and planning all add to its cost.
Getir CEO Batuhan Gültakan says the company lets consumers shop reliably without adding a grocery-store corner to their daily triangle of home, work and their child's school, giving families back time.
According to the research, a weekly or larger grocery shop takes an average of 111 minutes, from preparing the list to putting the items away at home. When shopping with children, that rises to 181 minutes. If the shop is repeated weekly, 111 minutes adds up to at least 96 hours a year, a full four days.
The average round-trip cost of TL 249 reported by participants comes to TL 12,950 a year in transport expenses at the same frequency. Gültakan says promotions are a strong factor in trying online grocery shopping, but that as usage deepens, time, convenience and a personalized experience become more decisive. He added that lasting use requires a balance of time, budget and convenience.
Shopping starts before you reach store
Asked what they would do if the time spent on grocery shopping were cut in half, 26% of participants said they would use the saved time to rest or sleep. Another 19% would spend it with loved ones, and 18% would devote it to themselves and personal care.
Before heading to the store, 47% of participants check what is missing at home, and 43% check prices, promotions and discounts. Another 43% ask household members what they need. Among those with busy lifestyles, the share who prepare a shopping list rises to 37%.
Getir responds to this planning process with features such as "My Shopping List," "Ready Basket" and personalized promotions and recommendations. The company says it aims to reduce the time spent searching for products, comparing them and building a basket, while leaving the final decision to the user.
Better decisions expected
Of the participants, 47% expect artificial intelligence to find better prices or promotions, 37% expect it to offer suggestions that fit their needs, and 29% expect it to save time. Meanwhile, 40% say it matters that the decision stays with the user.
Among AI-powered features, suggesting budget-friendly alternative products ranks first at 44%, followed by promotion or product suggestions that fit the basket at 36%, and reminders about forgotten items at 30%.
"Consumers expect AI to make a concrete contribution to their budget, their time and their needs. They also want the final decision to remain theirs," Gültakan said.
"We are turning the technology into a smart assistant that makes it easier for users to decide and helps them shape their baskets around their budget, needs and preferences. Our vision is to build an experience that reduces physical effort through strong logistics infrastructure, and decision and planning effort through AI and personalization," he noted.
AI, high-performance computing head into space
From the lunar surface to orbit, companies are racing to bring artificial intelligence and high-performance computing projects off the planet.
A new mission planning to run the first high-performance computing tests on the moon's surface is the latest example of growing efforts to process data in space rather than sending it back to Earth.
The idea of processing data generated on space missions where it is collected, without transmitting it to Earth, is taking concrete form through projects run by multiple companies and institutions.
AI on lunar surface
Astrolab's FLIP rover, a lunar exploration vehicle, is planned to reach the moon's south pole region on a mission due to launch in late 2026 under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
The Griffin-1 lander will carry the rover. FLIP will host the Spaceborne Computer-4 module, which Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) developed for space conditions.
The module is lightweight, self-contained and fanless. It uses a low-power central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU), along with a solid-state drive (SSD) storage solution from KIOXIA, a Japanese memory manufacturer.
The mission will test retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for large language models, visual inference, and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data processing for mapping, navigation and terrain analysis. The plan also calls for running the HPL (High-Performance LINPACK) and HPCG (High-Performance Conjugate Gradient) benchmarks, standard tests of supercomputer performance, on the lunar surface.
NASA will run its federated learning experiment (FLUID) on the system, which aims to show that multiple AI models can work together in a coordinated way. Deloitte will test anomaly detection capabilities with Silent Shield, the system it developed to detect cyberattacks. HPE says this will be the first high-performance computing benchmark run on the moon's surface. The company bases that claim on its own analysis of publicly available information as of Oct. 20.
Data storage on moon
Another name in the field is Florida-based Lonestar Data Holdings, which aims to build data infrastructure on the moon.
In 2025, the company sent a small-scale data center payload called "Freedom" to the moon aboard Intuitive Machines' Athena lander.
Lonestar's approach focuses less on computing than on secure, independent data storage. The company aims to offer a storage space protected from natural disasters, cyberattacks and geopolitical risks. Lonestar has also announced a Space Act agreement with NASA Ames to evaluate lunar edge data infrastructure concepts.
Türk Telekom's education tech investments grow under TT Ventures
Türk Telekom, one of Türkiye's leading telecoms and technology companies, has been expanding its presence in education technology for years through TT Ventures, its corporate venture capital company.
Founded in 2018, TT Ventures has continued its investments since September 2022 through the independently managed TT Ventures Venture Capital Investment Fund (VCIF), through which it has invested in 12 startups.
The company's executives have said before that education is one of the main areas of its investment strategy.
Its best-known step in the field has been the partnership with MentalUP. TT Ventures became a partner in MentalUP, a gamified education platform that develops children's thinking and learning skills. MentalUP was included in 2016 in Pilot, Türk Telekom's startup acceleration program, and the relationship later turned into a partnership through TT Ventures.
As remote learning spread during the pandemic, the platform gained 500,000 new subscribers and reached 5.5 million users.
Startup values rising
On the acceleration side, the Pilot program continues to open doors for education startups.
Among the 12th-term startups in the program was Archi's Academy, which offers project-based, personalized online education in software.
Türk Telekom runs this program under the TT Ventures umbrella. The total valuation of the startups TT Ventures has invested in has reached $576 million, and education platforms such as Nara, which focuses on virtual and augmented reality, stand out in the portfolio.
Looking at the broader picture, TT Ventures' portfolio is not limited to education. Energy and mobility are also among its priority investment areas. Even so, education technology remains a visible segment of Türk Telekom's startup strategy, stretching from MentalUP to Pilot graduates.