Loom Games CEO Kübra Gündoğan wins Rising Star at the Pocket Gamer Mobile Games Awards 2026

• Kübra Gündoğan won Rising Star at the Pocket Gamer Mobile Games Awards 2026.
• The ceremony took place in Cologne, Germany on August 25th.

Kübra Gündoğan has won the Rising Star award at the Pocket Gamer Mobile Games Awards 2026 in association with Samsung Gaming Hub.

Celebrating mobile game makers from around the globe, PocketGamer.biz hosted this year’s awards ceremony in Cologne last night. Taking place during Gamescom week, the show served as a celebration of the creators, game makers, movers and shakers keeping mobile hot and happening in 2026.

We spent the night cheering on finalists across more than 20 categories.

This article is focused on Rising Star winner Gündoğan, the co-founder and CEO of Türkiye’s new powerhouse Loom Games.

New for 2026, this award was also voted on by the industry, recognising a person from anywhere in the world who has demonstrated a considerable amount of success, influence and impact since their relatively recent arrival - and what an impact Gündoğan has had.

Rising Star

Loom Games picked up multiple awards at this year’s show, including Game of the Year with Pixel Flow, Best Game Innovation and Best Developer. Naturally, the whole team deserves to be celebrated for these sweeping wins, and at the head of those efforts is CEO Gündoğan.

Six years ago, she was fresh out of a computer engineering degree with a belief that if you build fast enough and are honest about what isn't working, eventually you find what is. She’s been involved in building around 70 prototypes, previously working on casual games at Crescive Games before Loom Games was established.

In 2025, she set out to raise investment for the new studio and that August, Pixel Flow launched to near-immediate success. Within months it had 10 million players and became the only Turkish-developed casual puzzle game to break into the US top 20 grossing charts.

Its flagship also has an estimated $200 million in player spending already and it’s surely making serious ad revenue from its tens of millions of players.

Then there’s the majority stake acquisition by Scopely in February 2026, valuing Loom Games at more than $1 billion. This makes the studio Türkiye's fastest unicorn, and Gündoğan is still building today.

"This isn’t about exiting early, it’s about setting up Pixel Flow for long-term growth and impact, and starting the next chapter of what we hope to achieve as a team. This is not an exit story - it’s a new beginning," she said.

Among the other finalists for this year’s Rising Star were Socialpoint’s Ivan Zaguirre Sanchez, Snap Finger Click’s Ruth Carnegie and Geeklab’s Senni Nurmi. Check out the full list of winners here.