In the modern business canon, few achievements are as mythologized, or as misunderstood, as scaling under pressure. From wartime production lines to post-dotcom recoveries, the companies that have managed to expand amidst chaos don’t just survive, they write the rules others follow. Nexus, led by Gurhan Kiziloz, may be shaping up to be one of them.
The group reported $546 million in revenue for the first half of 2025, powered by its flagship gaming platforms: Megaposta, Spartans, and Lanistar. That figure still leaves some ground to cover before the $1.45 billion year-end projection, but it reflects a 110% year-on-year increase, evidence of momentum and not just scale. And perhaps more tellingly, it arrives without the traditional playbook: no outside capital, no roadmap borrowed from consulting giants, and no over-reliance on external hires. Just a set of teams, guided by a founder whose motto, “persistence beats resistance”, has gone from mantra to mechanism.
If there’s a historical analogue here, it might be Toyota’s post-war rise. After World War II, Toyota faced material shortages, financial instability, and a domestic market in turmoil. But it developed a production system that emphasized flexibility, quality control, and internal learning, a far cry from the brute-scale American model. The result was not just survival, but market dominance. Like Toyota, Nexus appears to value rhythm over rush, designing internal systems and culture before chasing outward scale. Its expansion into Brazil, now generating $400 million annually, was quiet, methodical, and fully operational before broader industry attention.
There’s also resonance with Dell in the early 1990s. As rivals focused on retailers and intermediaries, Dell doubled down on direct-to-consumer channels, optimizing supply chains and customizing inventory management at scale. That vertical integration was a logistical masterstroke, but it also demanded relentless attention to detail, something that is echoed in Nexus’s compliance-heavy operating model. Licensing, payment rails, localized operations, all handled internally, often country by country, regulation by regulation. This isn’t flashy expansion; it’s expansion that holds.
Of course, comparison is never perfect. Nexus isn’t a manufacturing firm like Toyota or Dell, nor is it trying to reinvent entire categories. But what it shares with those companies is a level of internal confidence that allows it to move fast without external validation. The hiring model is insular by design, the communication culture fast-moving and direct. Not everyone thrives in that kind of environment, but the results so far suggest that many do.
Another relevant parallel: Netflix in the late 2000s. Having disrupted video rentals with DVDs, the company bet early on streaming, well before the broadband infrastructure or consumer habits had caught up. It faced setbacks, including public backlash during the ill-fated Qwikster split, but its internal conviction held. That focus on long-term execution rather than short-term optics is something that also feels familiar in Nexus’s operations. It doesn’t pre-announce launches or chase headlines; instead, it signals through results. This quarter, the numbers did the talking.
Internally, the culture leans toward that of a high-performance squad more than a corporate ‘family’, an idea Netflix itself popularized. Staff are given wide latitude, but also wide responsibility. Mistakes aren’t penalized arbitrarily, but indecision, especially when prolonged, often is. Gurhan’s influence here is less about presence and more about pace: he’s known to make decisions quickly, change directions if needed, and communicate priorities in simple terms, “if something works, we go.” The simplicity is strategic; it cuts through.
Yet for all the drive, there’s no blitzscaling here. Nexus’s approach to growth is methodical, almost cautious. The reason has less to do with risk-aversion and more to do with ownership. Without external funding dictating strategy or quarterly returns to answer to, the company has kept decision-making within a tight, operationally literate core. That isn’t always the fastest path, but it’s often the clearest.
It’s worth noting that many of the firms who scaled with similar discipline, Amazon in its early years, or IKEA during its global rollout, built from a position of scarcity. They couldn’t afford inefficiency. For Amazon, margins were razor-thin in the early 2000s, yet it built infrastructure anyway, anticipating future returns. For IKEA, the flat-pack model was not only a logistical innovation but a cost necessity. Nexus, in its own sector, appears to have embraced a similar ethos: build lean, build local, and only expand what you understand.
With projections putting the company among the top 100 global gaming operators by revenue, the momentum is measurable. But what’s harder to measure, and arguably more valuable, is the internal cohesion that allows this kind of scaling to happen. At Nexus, that cohesion wasn’t hired in, or outsourced. It was built.
And that may be the real story here. In a market awash with rapid-growth firms burning through VC cash, Nexus is carving out a model that relies less on capital and more on conviction. It is far from finished. But in its unflashy, internally-driven march forward, it may be joining the ranks of firms whose biggest breakthroughs happened not during calm, but amidst chaos.
This article was written in cooperation with Gurhan Kiziloz