Lithuanian gaming marketplace Eneba raises €6.5M to keep up with lockdown-driven growth

With the increased demand for digital entertainment during the pandemic, a Lithuanian gaming marketplace, Eneba, has announced that it has raised $8M (approx €6.5M) in a fresh round of funding led by Practica Capital and InReach Ventures – the AI-powered venture capital firm. 

In addition, FJ Labs and a group of established Angel investors including Mantas Mikuckas, COO of Vinted, also participated in this round.

Use of the raised capital

The fresh funds in the current round will help the startup to accelerate its growth even further. Eneba will use its funding to accelerate investments in product development making the platform faster, safer, and easier to use, as well as 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 claiming to stand as one of the safest marketplaces on the internet.

Everything about Eneba

Launched in 2018 by two Lithuanian school friends, Vytis Uogintas and Zygimantas Miksta, Eneba provides a marketplace for gamers to safely purchase everything they need for popular games. 

The company’s mission is to bring an outstanding selection of games to every single interested player, in a safe, trustworthy, and economical manner. Eneba presented the market with a ‘one-click buy’ gamer experience and a faster, more secure service by using proprietary machine learning and fingerprinting technology.

In addition, the Eneba team has also created localised gaming experiences that proved an immediate hit with gamers. It was done by using automatic optimising discovery tools for locally trending gaming products.

Lockdown surge 

Zygimantas Miksta, co-founder and CMO at Eneba says, “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.”

To keep up with the demand, Eneba expanded its team quickly and is now comprised of 130 software developers, risk analysts, and marketers. The company has a community of 26 million unique users across Lithuania, the UK, Germany, 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 organisation growth has been one of the biggest to date. However, he also emphasises 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,” says Uogintas.