Cheer Games has raised $4.5 million in its pre-seed round.

The Barcelona-based team, founded by former leads at AppLovin’s Lion Studios and creators of Hexa Sort, said the funding – led by Makers Fund with Play Ventures – will “accelerate development of Cheer’s upcoming slate of games and expand its Barcelona headquarters with new global talent.”

It already employs an 11-person team with “deep roots in the mobile industry” and said it “is actively hiring.”

“When I look across the table at Berkay, Kutay, and Ertan, I see the people who built the games our industry measures itself against and who chose to bet on what comes next,” said said Cheer Games’ CEO and co-founder, Emre Gercel.

“Berkay’s design vision built Hexa Sort into a top-grossing sort game in the world which the industry is still catching up. Kutay didn’t just scale games, he scaled the machine that scales games. Ertan built not one but two successful studios from scratch. That collective experience is not something you find twice.”

Gercel added: “We started Cheer because we believed we could build something more durable than the industry’s short-term thinking allows for. To build games that become franchises and studios that become institutions. Barcelona gives us the global stage, our Turkish roots give us the hunger, and this team gives me complete confidence that we’ll deliver.”

Yesterday, we also reported Vento Games has similarly raised $4 million in its latest seed round.