Gamming united: a new gaming fund for Eastern Europe and the Microsoft/Discord deal breakdown

The first game-focused venture capital fund to be launched in the Post-Soviet area, which is not connected to any of the big players in the market. The Games Fund has a total volume of $50M and will invest up to $2M in Pre-seed and Round A gaming startups in Eastern Europe. Plans also include syndicates with other investors and adding later-stage companies to the portfolio and funding them with checks up to $5M. For now, the fund’s first deal is $500 000 for the Belarusian mobile studio Purple Games.

The Games Fund’s founders are former Mail.ru Games Ventures managers Maria Kochmola and Ilya Yeremeev. Among well-known investors are Lev Leviev, co-founder of VKontakte, investment bank Aream, and the founders of game developers Plarium and Deus Craft. Managing partners of major funds — Igor Ryabensky (AltaIR Capital), Viktor Orlovsky (Fort Ross Ventures), as well as MGVC managing director Ilya Karpinsky and Vorhaus Advisors CEO Mike Vorhaus — have been brought in as executives. Among other things, they will help shape the pipeline of projects that do not fall into the funnel of the funds themselves.

The field of gaming is actively growing, with the development of high-speed networks, 5G and internet technology only pushing the industry forward. Statistics show that the number of players is increasing year-on-year, as is the industry’s total revenue, which was $162.3B in 2020.

From the latest developments in the gaming market, it was announced today that Discord has turned down a merger deal with Microsoft Corporation. According to sources, the deal was for $12B. Meanwhile, Twitter was also interested in the purchase, which in turn offered between $15B and $18B. Discord’s rejection is linked to the company’s plans for an IPO in the long term.

Today, Discord is one of the gaming community’s most famous platforms. In 2021, their MAU reached 140M users. The company ended 2020 with 300 million registered users and $130M in revenues — the pandemic has added popularity to the platform, through which streaming started not only for game bloggers. The company’s valuation has now reached $7B.