• Bucharest-based Amber, an independent game development company offering a network of studios with different specializations, has raised €20M from a fund advised by Emona Capital, a UK-born investment fund.
• The new capital will be used to accelerate Amber’s international scaling through M&As.
• The gaming studio is now valued at over €190M.
Amber Studio is working on offering game production solutions from concept to delivery. Amongst their services, they offer game production, live operations, co-development, engineering, design, art production, and quality assurance. This news follows the acquisition of other gaming projects, KaraOKulta, and Scorpius Games, in 2020, part of a shift that started five years ago towards full game development, a key instrument to their accelerated growth.
“After almost a decade of purely organic development, we are pleased to enter a new stage of accelerated growth. As a people-centric organization, it was crucial for us to find a partner who understands and respects our development vision. With Emona, we share the goals for Amber’s future – one that is focused on key stakeholders, our clients, and our teams, and built on a promise always to deliver quality through incremental and breakthrough innovation,” Jaime Giné, CEO of Amber, shared in the press release.
The funding round will be used to push forward global mergers and acquisitions to develop the Amber community and accelerate innovation in the gaming market. The team wants to tap into new markets, like South-East Asia, as well as expand its range of services and introduce new game genre specialization – PC, consoles, mobile, as well as in new emerging platforms such as AR, VR, crypto, and NFT.
Almost a decade in the making
“This is the beginning of a new chapter in the history of Amber, one that will see us extending our network of studios to cover all genres and platforms while reinforcing our studio service capabilities. At this larger scale, we can realize our agency’s vision to evolve game development ecosystems around the world through investments in community and innovation,” Mihai Pohontu, Chairman of Amber, added.
Amber was launched in 2013 in Bucharest, Romania, by Mihai Pohontu, “to leverage the local talent and build an independent gaming powerhouse that would create games in Romania for the whole world to play them,” as he tells The Recursive. Almost a decade later, it has offices also in Botosani, Guadalajara, Montreal, Kyiv, Warsaw, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. There are over 1200 gaming specialists in the company, and they have been building a #HerOwnGame business culture to combat prejudices faced by women who want to pursue a career in the gaming industry.
Last year, the company announced a turnover of $30M, depicting over 50% annual growth rate in the last few years. Some of their game development projects include collaborations with Amazon, Disney, and NBC Universal, to name a few.
The global gaming industry
The video game market has been on an exponential ride for a couple of years now. The global gaming industry market size is expected to be worth over €300B by 2026, with Mobile Gaming as the largest segment.
So, it’s no surprise that we have seen a lot of movement in this sector in the past year in our neck of the woods as well. Romanian Metagame was acquired by Fortis, a global video game developer; Machinations.io raised over €3M; while in Croatia, a €50M campus was launched to help grow the gaming industry in Southeast Europe.
