Nival, a global developer of cross-platform strategy games, announced today that it has secured $6 million from the Russian fund Almaz Capital to fuel its global expansion strategy. The valuation of this Series A round has not been disclosed.
To date Nival has been financed by CEO and founder Sergey Orlovskiy, who holds a majority stake, plus Russian enterprise software leader 1C and Mail.ru Group, an LSE-listed Russian Internet group.
Nival’s track record includes the best-selling Blitzkrieg, Prime World, Heroes of Might and Magic V, Silent Storm and Etherlords game series. The company currently spreads more than 200 employees across four development studios, with offices in Hallandale, Florida (USA), Moscow and St. Petersburg (Russia), Kiev (Ukraine) and Minsk (Belarus).
“At Nival we’ve created a critically acclaimed development studio with more than 200 international press awards,” Orlovskiy claims.
Founded 17 years ago, Nival is one of only a few high tech companies with Russian origins that have successfully asserted themselves on the global market. Among other notable examples are Internet security solution providers Kaspersky and Dr. Web, software publishers Parallels and Abbyy, and game developers Game Insight and Zeptolab – as well as the NASDAQ-listed Russian payment giant QIWI, which is expanding internationally.
Launched in 2008 by Alexander Galitsky, a veteran of the Russian venture industry, Almaz Capital is widely seen as one of the most established Russian funds. Its LPs include Cisco and EBRD as well as the World Bank subsidiary IFC. The fund’s “geo-connect strategy” focuses on early- and expansion-stage venture investments in high-tech sectors such as enterprise and cloud computing, mobile, Internet infrastructure and services, data storage and management, and ecommerce. Initially focusing on Russia and neighboring countries, the fund has progressively enlarged its focus to encompass companies virtually anywhere in the world with connections to Russia.
