Saudi's Floaty Studio raises $1 million from Merak Capital

Floaty Studio, a Riyadh based mobile game developer, has closed a one million dollar investment round from Merak Capital, deployed through the firm's dedicated Merak Gaming Fund. The deal adds another name to the growing list of Saudi gaming startups pulling in institutional money as the kingdom pushes to build a homegrown industry that can compete on a global stage. Founded in 2023, Floaty Studio has built its identity around casual and hybrid casual mobile titles aimed squarely at international players rather than a purely local audience. The studio's approach leans on simple, accessible gameplay mechanics paired with systems meant to keep players engaged over the long haul, a formula that has worked well for casual game makers elsewhere in the world. Right now the team is focused on two flagship projects, Pirasea, a strategy game set in a pirate themed world, and Hero Squad, a sci fi action title where players assemble squads of heroes to fight off robotic enemies. Beyond these two, reporting suggests the studio has also been quietly testing several other titles across different genres, including a roguelike, an auto chess game, and a merge strategy title, a sign that Floaty is spreading its bets across formats rather than betting everything on one game finding an audience. The fresh capital is earmarked for scaling up production capacity, growing the creative team, and pushing the studio's international growth strategy forward. For a young studio moving from prototype work to a real commercial pipeline, that kind of funding often marks the difference between staying a small passion project and becoming a legitimate development house capable of shipping and supporting multiple live titles at once. Floaty's path to this raise also says something about how Saudi Arabia's gaming ecosystem is maturing. The studio came up through NEOM's Level Up Accelerator program, which gave its founders early mentorship in areas like production, user acquisition, and monetization before they were considered ready for institutional venture funding. That pipeline, from accelerator to seed style investment, is becoming a repeatable pattern in the kingdom rather than a one off success story. Merak Capital's involvement fits into a broader pattern too. The Merak Gaming Fund, an eighty million dollar vehicle backed by Saudi Arabia's National Development Fund and established in late 2024, has already put money behind other regional studios, including Qwacks and Khosouf Studio, the latter a UAE based developer that relocated its operations to Saudi Arabia after receiving backing. That relocation detail is worth sitting with, since it points to a wider MENA dynamic where Saudi Arabia is actively pulling gaming talent and studios from across the Gulf toward Riyadh, using capital, accelerator programs, and Vision 2030 backed initiatives as the draw. The UAE remains a strong regional player in gaming and esports in its own right, but Saudi Arabia's combination of sovereign wealth backing, dedicated gaming funds, and accelerator infrastructure is giving it an edge in attracting early stage studios specifically. For founders across the Gulf building casual and mobile titles, the message coming out of deals like Floaty's is fairly direct, that the money and support infrastructure increasingly sits in Riyadh, and studios elsewhere in the region are taking notice. Merak Capital has framed the investment as a vote of confidence in Floaty's product direction and in Saudi Arabia's broader emergence as a serious hub for game development talent. Whether Pirasea or Hero Squad end up breaking through in a crowded global mobile market remains to be seen, but the funding itself reflects a steady, deliberate build out of Saudi Arabia's gaming sector, one studio and one check at a time.