Investing in Spill Games

Toys and games are the preludes to serious ideas.

— Charles Eames

When Charles Eames said this in 1961, he was defending the seriousness hidden inside play. The idea is that while games look like diversions, they often represent a system of real depth. It is hard to think of a better lens for the humble genre of puzzle games, or for the studio we are backing to build them.

Picture a gamer, and you probably see a teenager with a console, or a twenty-something deep in a battle royale. But there is a completely different set of gamers who are fueling the world of puzzle games, the fastest-growing mobile gaming category. For all their modesty next to console blockbusters, puzzle games are what most of the world actually plays in the few moments they get to themselves.

Imagine a nurse on a break at the end of a twelve-hour shift, a retired teacher with their morning coffee, or a parent waiting for their kids to return from school, what do they do in their silent moments between a packed schedule? Their phone comes out, and what opens is not a blockbuster game but a grid. Think of a match-3, crossword, or a hidden-object scene. These are people in the 30-50 year age group who would never call themselves gamers but return to playing puzzle games day after day for years on end. They are also the ones who consistently pay for games.

What draws them into this gaming category is its simplicity. They may not want to learn new controls/mechanics or master a meta, but what they do want is a simple game mechanic they can understand in 10 seconds or less that makes use of their time well while giving them a small win.

They also have a settled routine with time to fill and the disposable income to pay for something they enjoy every day. Puzzle games are the genre built for exactly them. It’s the reason why the crossword and the jigsaw survived decades of new entertainment formats and then eventually conquered the smartphone.

Spill Games is building for exactly this audience. It is an AI-native studio that makes puzzle games, founded on the unusual idea that a studio's machinery should come before its first game. Here’s why we think that idea matters, and why we backed the team behind it.

The world's most-played genre

Casual mobile gaming is a roughly $40 Bn market. Puzzle is its fastest-growing sub-category, a roughly $15 Bn segment compounding at about 8% a year. But almost none of the money in this category changes hands the way a console or PC game is bought upfront. A puzzle game earns in two ways. It earns when it shows you an ad. Usually a banner along the bottom, an interstitial between levels, or a video you choose to watch in exchange for a hint. And it earns when you pay a little to ease a moment of frustration during gameplay i.e., when you buy an extra life when you have run out, more energy to keep playing, or a booster to clear the level you’ve been stuck on for ages. Interestingly, most of us would have made these purchases without ever thinking of it as having bought a game.

The prize for building an enduring puzzle studio has also been visible for a while, and it has been claimed in very different ways. Dream Games took the most familiar mechanic in the category, Match-3, and polished Royal Match for two years until it overtook Candy Crush as the world's highest-grossing puzzle game; Royal Match has since passed 300 million downloads and grosses well over a billion dollars a year. Easybrain never invented a mechanic at all. It modernised Sudoku, Nonograms and Jigsaw into evergreen apps, bootstrapped to hundreds of millions in annual revenue, and sold to Miniclip for over a billion dollars. Tripledot ran casual gaming as a portfolio, spotting mechanics before they got crowded and operating dozens of titles at once. Grand Games, barely two years old, is doing the same for the hybrid-casual category and has already crossed fifty million downloads.

These studios rarely invent a new mechanic. Every one was started by operators from an earlier studio, who found a repeatable method for making and scaling proven mechanics.

Every one of those methods, though, runs on people. The binding constraint of a casual studio has always been experienced human judgement. This could look like the product manager who can read a retention curve or the artist who can produce hundreds of levels or the growth team testing creatives around the clock. Studios have always scaled their judgement by hiring more people.

We believe the next generation of great gaming studios will multiply that judgement with AI rather than hire it. The tooling that makes this possible has only become viable in the last eighteen months. We believe the studios that wire such tooling throughout the whole pipeline now, rather than bolting it onto art or code individually, will run at a cost and cadence the incumbents were not built for.

Enter Spill Games

Spill Games is an AI-native casual gaming studio focused on puzzle games. The usual path for a new studio is to pick a title, launch it and then react to public reception. Spill Games spent its first months building the machinery of a studio before it built a single game, so that every title it launches runs on the same systems. This is what that looks like:

• Finding the format before it gets crowded. A market-intelligence layer scans dozens of live games a month for mechanics that have just started working and benchmarks them against the studio's own portfolio.
• Kill weak ideas before anyone builds them. New concepts are rigorously simulated against the studio's own player-behaviour data before a single level is made.
• Make content at blitzkrieg velocity. Levels that took an artist an hour are generated in minutes and hand-polished. An agentic QA layer catches difficulty spikes and visual glitches without a human in the loop.
• Grow and operate without waiting on anyone. Ads, including the playable try-before-you-install format casual games grow on, are generated in-house. Once a game is live, the backend predicts which players will churn on day one and intervenes at the level of the individual user.

Above all of it sits the studio's own AI copilot. A product manager can ask it why a metric dipped, have it draft the plan for a new feature, or get an analysis the moment a question occurs to them. The result is an organisation where a single product manager runs several more titles than what the industry norm allows, with an overall team that remains just sixteen people.

All of this machinery exists to win at the two numbers every casual studio lives by:

• what a player is worth over their lifetime compared to the cost of acquiring them (LTV/CAC)
• how fast they pay back the cost of acquiring them

Casual games are free to play, so a studio survives only if the average player eventually generates more than they cost to bring in, and the faster that happens, the faster the studio can reinvest in growth.

This setup has produced a portfolio of successful games for Spill Games in the last year alone across different puzzle sub-genres. Cozy Finds, a hidden-objects title; Zen Math Crossword; and Sticker by Number. The games are scaling on paid acquisition with retention and payback periods that match the category's best operators, and multiple more titles are in the pipeline.

What defines a gaming studio is usually a mix of user acquisition, game design & development, and product sharpness. Most young studios are strong in one or two of these aspects. Spill Games stands apart with prowess over all three areas early in their journey and in a way that is wired into the organisation’s system rather than resting on individuals.

Meet the founding team

India has produced exactly one global casual gaming studio of scale. PlaySimple, built out of Bengaluru on word games for a largely American audience, was acquired by Sweden's MTG in 2021 in one of the largest gaming exits the country has seen. We had the privilege of a front-row seat as early investors to this arc, and we saw up close what it takes to run a casual studio well. The people who ran product, growth and live-ops inside it are the closest thing India has to the Peak Games alumni who seeded Dream Games, Bigger Games, and Grand Games in Istanbul.

Om Misra, Harsh Garg and Tapan Ranjan are three of those people. Between them, they spent the better part of a decade inside PlaySimple and Zynga. That experience is visible in how they built Spill Games. The founding choice, to spend the first months on machinery rather than on chasing a hit, is something only operators who have lived through the alternative would make. They have been equally deliberate about the team, drawing seasoned casual operators into a group that stays small on purpose. In our conversations with Om, Harsh and Tapan, what stood out was how detail-oriented and metrics-driven their decisions are. Every feature came with the experiment behind it; every game came with the reason it was picked and the reason another was dropped.

Casual gaming is a market where every feature edge is eventually copied, and the road from a game that works to a game that scales is nonlinear. The durable advantage belongs to whoever finds the next edge fastest. Very few studios can iterate daily on the games they already run while perfecting new ones across categories at the same time, and that combination is what separates the giants of this industry from the one-hit studios. Spill Games has built the machine to do exactly that and shown the patience to keep doing it, and we believe this team and this approach can grow into one of those giants.

Eames was right that games are preludes to serious ideas, and the serious idea inside Spill Games is a studio where systems can truly compound. We are delighted to partner with Om, Harsh, and Tapan as they build it.

If you are building in gaming or consumer AI, we would love to hear from you. Reach out to shreedhar@elevationcapital.com, naman@elevationcapital.com, or manish@elevationcapital.com.