After lockdowns boost gaming marketplace Eneba, it raises $8M from Practica Capital and InReach Ventures

Eneba, the world’s fastest-growing marketplace for gamers, has today announced that it has raised a total of $8M led by Practica Capital and InReach Ventures, the AI-powered venture capital firm, with contribution from FJ Labs and a group of established Angel investors including Mantas Mikuckas, COO of Vinted. 

Launched in 2018 by two Lithuanian school friends, Vytis Uogintas and Žygimantas Mikšta, Eneba provides a marketplace for gamers to safely purchase everything they need for the world’s most popular games. Combining an unrivalled buying experience with superior proprietary security features, Eneba has already attracted a community of 26 million unique users.

Operating under the radar until now, Eneba has quickly made an impact in the gaming sector thanks to its new approach, where previously others have not innovated. Eneba presented the market with a superior ‘one-click buy’ gamer experience and a faster, more secure service by using proprietary machine learning and fingerprinting technology. 

The team also created localised gaming experiences that proved an immediate hit with gamers by using automatic optimising discovery tools for locally trending gaming products. 

As COVID-19 struck Eneba was already growing fast, but, with an increased shift to digital entertainment, the startup experienced exponential growth and an increased interest from US gamers; now the company’s fastest-growing geography.

"We had a lot of new users coming to Eneba during these uncertain times. While it was extremely satisfying to see our numbers increasing tenfold, there was a challenge to meet the demand. To better reflect our user numbers, we had to quickly expand our team," said Co-Founder and CMO, Žygimantas Mikšta. "We now have a 130-strong team of brilliant software developers, risk analysts and marketing experts that have built a delightful experience for 26 million consumers across multiple geographies such as the UK, Germany, Lithuania, Spain, France, Poland, and other European countries."

As the startup grew, there were many challenges for the company in order to maintain its newfound momentum. Vytis Uogintas, CO-Founder and CEO said that rapid organization growth has been one of the biggest to date. However, he also emphasizes that Eneba’s breakthrough has been determined by the team.

"Finding people you can trust and who share your vision is not easy. However, we had plenty of contacts from our previous ventures that kickstarted the whole process. Right from the get-go, we were emphasizing our company culture as our top priority. For me, it's much more enjoyable to see happy colleagues and when they're happy, it's easier to communicate with them and reach desired goals."

Eneba will use its funding to accelerate investments in product development making the platform faster, safer and easier to use and to expand further in the US and across other key global markets.  To prepare for this roll-out, Eneba has developed its own risk management system. The new system was developed in-house to better fit the company’s goals. It eliminates many risky transactions, simplifies the refunding process, and blocks majority fraud threats, thus making Eneba stand as one of the safest marketplaces on the internet.

“We are thrilled to be backing Vytis and Žygimantas. We’ve been impressed by their ability to execute at such speed as their company quickly scales and to drive an incredible product with a unique value proposition for gamers. It also could not have come at a better time. We are excited to support one more team from the Baltics that has a clear ambition to lead their sector globally,” said Donatas Keras, partner at Practica Capital.

Co-founder of InReach Ventures, Roberto Bonanzinga, said “In Europe we have a tradition of building successful companies in the gaming space. We are very excited to have discovered Eneba thanks to our AI platform when the company was unknown and under the radar. We have been extremely impressed by what the founders have been able to build in such a short amount of time.”