👯 Founder(s): Nick Katselapov — Founder (co-founder of Wargaming).
📅 Founding year: 2023
🏭 Industry: Gaming (mobile games investment company)
💥 Problem: Early-stage mobile game studios face a funding gap — they need a proven marketing track record to get financing, but building that track record needs major upfront capital (specialist UA financiers typically want several months of campaign history, $300–500k in prior marketing spend, and a predictable payback before funding user acquisition).
📣 Solution: Mika Games invests before a studio’s user-acquisition economics are proven — using equity to back the team/product plus a separate capital pool to finance larger paid-acquisition tests. Those campaigns generate the data to validate retention, monetization and payback at scale, and can then help studios access larger financing.
👥 Customers: Free-to-play mobile game studios at soft-launch stage (globally, across genres). Portfolio now spans casual, hybrid-casual, midcore and hardcore competitive strategy.
🎳 Team size: 2-10
🌱 Stage: Seed
💰 Investment amount: €8.92M ($10M)
🚀 Funded by: Flint Capital (lead), with several new and existing investors.
👁️🗨️ Investor’s perspective: Sergey Gribov, General Partner at Flint Capital: “Investing before a game’s economics are proven can look risky when each studio is treated as a standalone bet. Mika changes that equation by spreading exposure across teams and genres, deploying capital in stages, and using product and cohort data to determine where to invest further. For Flint, this creates an attractive risk-return profile: diversification and disciplined capital allocation help manage the downside, while equity stakes acquired early preserve a meaningful upside in the studios that scale.”
💡 It will be spent on: Helping mobile game studios bridge the gap between soft launch and large-scale paid marketing — funding product development and marketing campaigns.
💬 In their own words: Nick Katselapov, Founder: “Global gaming user acquisition spend reached $25 billion in 2025… the number of new titles in the US top 1,000 by downloads fell from about 200 in 2020 to just over 100 in 2024, and games more than two years old generated over 80% of revenue in most genres. Early marketing capital can therefore influence which games players ever get to discover. Our aim is to give new titles enough runway to reach players.”
💪 Their specialty: A two-pronged model — equity for team/product plus a dedicated pool for paid-acquisition tests — that de-risks by diversifying across studios and genres and deploying capital in stages based on cohort data. Grew from 3 to 5 portfolio studios this year. Portfolio hits: Guli Games’ Legendale (3M+ players), Agonalea Games’ Punko (500k+ downloads), Bulberry Studio’s Wargard, and LevelApp (Merge Dale, Sea Bloom).
🔑 Business model: Gaming investment company — takes early equity stakes in F2P mobile studios and finances their user acquisition, working with founders on UA, product, game design, monetization and operations.
💸 Funding so far: €8.92M ($10M)