Back at the beginning of this year the Openfund (a five-year-old investment fund out of Athens, Greece) closed its second fund totalling €10 million under management. They set to work putting that to good use, investing in Incrediblue (a kind of Airbnb for private leisure boats which is really taking off) and WorkableHR, a platform for simplifying the recruitment process.
And today they have backed a mobile and desktop casual-game development studio. Total Eclipse announced a $580,000 (€430,000) financing round led by Openfund, along with participating angel investors. Total Eclipse plans to use the fund to supercharge its platform in casual gaming, hiring, and launching new games.
So it seems like the Greek ecosystem is really starting to motor – and this, following our fantastic meetup in Athens at the beginning of the year.
So far Total Eclipse has shipped seven titles in nine years, across different genres, platforms, and markets including the Clockwork Man series (a hidden object/adventure for Win/Mac/Linux set in a Victorian steampunk universe), amongst one of the first games to launch on Steam for Linux. Its latest release, A Clockwork Brain, is a puzzle game for iOS that blends brain-training with frantic puzzle solving and has had over 750,000 downloads so far.
Argiris Bendilas, Total Eclipse co-founder and CEO, says the company has kept the IP rights to all its games and has since gone DRM-free, supported Linux, and launched on Steam. George Kasselakis, Openfund partner, says they invested because it was “a small studio quietly designing world-class games out of Thessaloniki, Northern Greece.”
The Openfund is becoming a case study in how to reenergise a difficult market like Greece with startups that are actually aimed at international markets, using the innate talent in the region combined with the capitally efficient local costs.