New Mobile Game Developer Ministry Raises €1.8M Seed To Build A Dream Games Team

Ministry, a new mobile game developer based in Helsinki has raised €1.8M in funding from Index Ventures, Initial Capital, Sunstone Capital and Proxy Ventures, among others.

To put that in context, Index backed Supercell; Initial backed Supercell and Super Evil Mega Corporation; Sunstone has backed multiple games companies; and Proxy was founded by the creators of Supercell and Peak. Other investors include investor Henric Suuronen, co-founder of Nonstop Games, the Singapore-based mobile games company recently acquired by King.

So €1.8 million may not sound like a lot in the scheme of things, but the wider background is that this is the most high-profile backing any Nordic games company has ever gotten at seed stage since Supercell.

Teppo Soininen, CEO and Co-Founder of Ministry, says he wants to”build a company where the best game developers of the industry can simply focus on creating great games and cutting-edge technology, without distractions.”

Soininen is also a key shareholder in Umbra Software, which is used in games such as Destiny, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and Witcher 3.

The Ministry team also already looking like a who’s who of Games. It includes Sami March, a games artist and graphic designer who worked at Red Lynx, Grey Area and Digital Chocolate, and Teemu Harju, a software engineer previously with Nokia, Grand Cru and Grey Area. Petri Kero, CTO of Ministry, was previously the founder of drawElements, a company acquired by Google.

It is interesting to see Index Ventures and Initial Capital investing in Ministry straight after exiting Supercell, which of course was co-founded by Aapo Bovellan, the founding partner of Proxy Ventures who is also investing in Ministry. Obviously Finns can’t get enough of making games.

But more seriously, if you include Rovio, the talent that is now assembled in Helsinki has snow made it a world-class cluster of games startups.