Who owns Dream Games? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Dream Games is one of the most valuable private companies to come out of Turkey, and it built that value on essentially one hit. Its flagship puzzle game, Royal Match, ranks among the highest-grossing mobile titles in the world, and a 2024 sequel, Royal Kingdom, extended the franchise. The studio reaches players through the Apple App Store and Google Play rather than through consoles or PC storefronts.

The company is private, so there is no ticker to follow and no public shareholder register. That makes the ownership question more interesting than it is for a listed studio. Control sits with a small group of founders, a rotating cast of venture investors bought in early, and a private equity firm arrived in 2025 to take the outside equity stake.

Understanding who owns Dream Games means tracing two things: how much of the company its founders still hold, and which outside investors have moved in and out as the studio's value climbed from a startup idea to a multibillion-dollar business in six years. This article follows that chain from the founding team to the institutions that back it today.

Dream Games was founded in 2019 in Istanbul, Turkey, by five colleagues who had worked together at Peak Games, another Turkish mobile studio whose casual-games business Zynga later bought for $1.8 billion. The founding team is Soner Aydemir, Ikbal Namli, Hakan Saglam, Eren Sengul, and Serdar Yilmaz. Aydemir serves as chief executive.

The studio takes a deliberately narrow approach. Rather than publish a wide catalog, it concentrates on a small number of high-production match-three puzzle games and pours resources into live operations, content updates, and marketing. Its first title, Royal Match, launched globally in 2021 and pairs match-three puzzles with a castle-renovation theme. Its second, Royal Kingdom, launched in November 2024 as a sequel, backed by a large marketing campaign featuring figures such as LeBron James and Shakira.

That focus has produced outsized revenue for a studio of its size. Royal Match has generated more than $3 billion in lifetime player spending, and it grossed on the order of $1.4 billion in 2025 alone, placing it among the top three highest-grossing mobile games of the year. Across its portfolio, Dream Games has reported billions of dollars in cumulative revenue and hundreds of millions of downloads. The scale of that single-game revenue is the kind of figure a revenue calculator helps put in perspective, since almost all of it flows from in-app purchases in one franchise.

Dream Games has never held an initial public offering, and its shares do not trade on any exchange. It is a privately held company, which means ownership is concentrated among its founders and a small set of professional investors rather than spread across public markets. There is no ticker, no market capitalization set by daily trading, and no requirement to file the detailed shareholder disclosures a listed company must publish.

Because the company is private, exact ownership percentages are not disclosed. What is known comes from funding announcements, investor statements, and reporting around its financing rounds. The broad shape is clear: the five founders retain majority control, and outside investors hold minority stakes that have changed hands as the company matured.

The founders have kept control of Dream Games throughout its rise, which is unusual for a company that raised close to half a billion dollars in venture capital before its private equity deal. Every funding round diluted their combined stake, but the five co-founders still held a majority when CVC Capital Partners agreed to invest in 2025, and reporting around that deal indicated they would remain the majority shareholders afterward.

The precise split among the five founders has not been made public, and neither has each individual stake. What is disclosed is directional: as a group, the founding team retained control, and CEO Soner Aydemir and his co-founders continued to run the studio. This concentration of ownership in an active founding team is a defining feature of how Dream Games is governed.

Dream Games raised money quickly and at rising valuations. It went from a seed round to a $2.75 billion valuation in a little over two years, one of the fastest such climbs in European gaming. The table below summarizes its disclosed venture rounds.

Across these rounds, Dream Games raised roughly $467 million in total. The Series B round, co-led by Index Ventures and Makers Fund, made it Turkey's fastest company to reach a $1 billion valuation. The Series C round, led by Index Ventures with participation from IVP, BlackRock, Kora, and Balderton Capital, made it, at the time, one of the most valuable private mobile gaming companies in the world.

Makers Fund, a specialist interactive-entertainment investor, backed Dream Games first, leading the 2019 seed round before the studio had shipped a game. That early bet gave it a stake through the company's entire climb.

Index Ventures became the anchor investor across the later rounds, leading the Series A, co-leading the Series B, and leading the Series C. Its repeated participation signaled strong conviction and made it one of the most visible backers of the company.

IVP and Balderton Capital joined in the growth rounds, and Kora and funds managed by BlackRock participated in the Series C. These firms held minority financial stakes rather than operational control. In the 2025 CVC deal, this group of early venture backers agreed to sell their holdings and exit after roughly five years, handing the outside equity position to a single new partner.

The most important recent change to the ownership structure came in May 2025, when CVC Capital Partners, a large global private equity firm, announced a strategic investment in Dream Games. The transaction valued the studio at roughly $5 billion, close to double its Series C valuation from three years earlier.

The deal restructured who owns the outside equity. CVC bought out the early venture investors, including Index Ventures, Makers Fund, IVP, and Balderton, giving them a liquidity event after years of holding illiquid private stock. CVC became the studio's principal outside equity partner. Part of the financing came as debt from Blackstone and other lenders, with CVC and Blackstone reported to be committing more than $2 billion combined. Reporting at the time indicated the founders would retain majority ownership, though some outlets described CVC as acquiring a majority stake, and the exact post-deal split was not publicly confirmed.

Soner Aydemir is the co-founder and chief executive of Dream Games and the most prominent figure in its control. He led the team out of Peak Games in 2019 and has run the studio through its rapid rise. As part of the founding group that retained majority ownership, he combines executive leadership with a significant equity stake, giving him unusually direct influence over strategy for a company of this size.

Control at Dream Games sits with the five co-founders as a group: Soner Aydemir, Ikbal Namli, Hakan Saglam, Eren Sengul, and Serdar Yilmaz. All five came from Peak Games, and all five held equity through the venture rounds and the CVC deal. Their combined majority stake means strategic decisions, from which games to build to how aggressively to spend on marketing, rest with the operators rather than with an outside owner. The individual roles and precise holdings of each co-founder have not been fully disclosed.

As a private company, Dream Games does not publish its board composition. What is confirmed is that its outside investors, first the venture firms and now CVC, hold the customary governance and information rights that come with large minority or equity stakes. CVC, as a private equity firm with a controlling institutional position, would typically take board representation and a role in major strategic decisions, while day-to-day operations remain with the founding management team.

The clearest business risk tied to Dream Games' value is concentration. Royal Match accounts for the overwhelming majority of the company's revenue, reported at around 95% of its earnings in 2025. A studio valued at roughly $5 billion resting on essentially one franchise is exposed to shifts in player taste, platform policy, and competition. The 2024 launch of Royal Kingdom was in part an effort to broaden that base, but the company remains heavily reliant on the Royal Match universe.

Dream Games earns almost all of its money through in-app purchases on the Apple App Store and Google Play, which means it pays platform commissions and lives within rules set by Apple and Google. Changes to those commission structures, privacy features that affect mobile advertising, or store policies can move the economics of the business. This is a shared risk across mobile gaming, and it is one reason studios watch regulatory and antitrust fights over app store fees closely.

The studio's growth has been fueled by heavy spending on user acquisition, including high-profile campaigns with global celebrities. That spending is a lever and a risk. If the cost of acquiring paying players rises faster than the revenue those players generate, margins compress. Investors weighing the company's profitability watch this balance closely, and it is the kind of dynamic an EBITDA calculator is built to expose once marketing is treated as an operating cost rather than an afterthought.

The 2025 CVC deal introduced leverage into the structure through debt financing from Blackstone and others. Private equity ownership can bring discipline and capital, but debt-financed deals also add interest obligations and pressure to generate cash. How that affects Dream Games' freedom to invest in new games, versus optimizing the existing franchise for returns, is a live question for a studio that now answers to a private equity partner alongside its founders.

Ownership shapes how Dream Games is run in a way that public-market studios rarely match. Because the five founders retained majority control through every funding round and into the CVC deal, the people making creative and strategic decisions are the same people who own most of the company. That alignment can support a long-term view, letting the studio invest in live operations and new titles without the quarterly pressure a listed company faces. It also concentrates risk, since the judgment of a small founding team drives a multibillion-dollar enterprise.

The rotation of outside investors tells its own story. Venture firms like Index Ventures and Makers Fund took early risk when Dream Games was pre-revenue, rode the valuation from startup to $2.75 billion, and then exited through the CVC deal with a substantial return. That is the venture model working as intended. Their departure and CVC's arrival mark a shift from growth-stage venture backing to private equity ownership, which usually signals a more mature, cash-generative business being optimized rather than a young company chasing expansion. Comparing that path to how a public gaming owner like Take-Two Interactive is governed shows how differently control works when shares trade freely.

For the wider gaming industry, Dream Games is a case study in how much value a single well-run mobile franchise can create, and how private ownership lets a small team capture most of it. That contrasts with the sprawling, publicly traded or conglomerate-owned structures behind rivals. The largest force in mobile gaming, for instance, sits inside Tencent, while Western studio ownership often traces back to public companies like Electronic Arts or platform owners like Epic Games. Dream Games stayed founder-controlled through it all, which is the exception rather than the rule at this scale.

For players, the ownership structure is mostly invisible, but it has real effects. A founder-led studio focused on a small number of games tends to keep investing in the titles people already play, and the CVC partnership gives it capital to keep doing so. The main risk is the flip side of that focus: a company this dependent on one franchise has strong incentives to monetize it hard, and the pressure of private equity ownership can sharpen that further. Sizing the roughly $5 billion valuation against the studio's cash flows is the sort of exercise a business valuation calculator is designed for.

Dream Games is privately owned. Its five co-founders, Soner Aydemir, Ikbal Namli, Hakan Saglam, Eren Sengul, and Serdar Yilmaz, retained majority ownership through 2025. Private equity firm CVC Capital Partners is the principal outside equity partner following a 2025 deal that bought out the company's earlier venture investors. Exact stakes are not publicly disclosed.

No. Dream Games has never held an initial public offering, and its shares do not trade on any stock exchange. It is a private company, so it has no ticker and no publicly quoted market capitalization. Its value is set through private funding rounds and transactions, most recently the 2025 CVC deal.

Dream Games was founded in 2019 in Istanbul by five former Peak Games executives: Soner Aydemir, Ikbal Namli, Hakan Saglam, Eren Sengul, and Serdar Yilmaz. Soner Aydemir is the co-founder and CEO. Peak Games, where the team previously worked, was acquired by Zynga for $1.8 billion.

The largest owners are the five founders as a group, who held a combined majority stake. On the investor side, early backers included Makers Fund, Index Ventures, IVP, Balderton Capital, Kora, and BlackRock. In 2025, those venture investors exited and CVC Capital Partners became the main outside equity holder, with debt financing from Blackstone and others.

Dream Games raised roughly $467 million across a 2019 seed round and Series A, B, and C rounds through January 2022. Its valuation rose from around $1 billion at the Series B in mid-2021 to about $2.75 billion at the Series C in January 2022. The 2025 CVC deal valued the company at roughly $5 billion.