Bootstrapped and profitable Nordeus taking on EA in the social gaming space

Nordeus made quite a stir when their social football game, Top Eleven, beating gaming giant EA’s FIFA Superstars for the most monthly players, attracting over 2.8 million users.

The interesting thing about this Belgrade, Serbia-based startup, however, isn’t the number of users: they’ve had more than 700,000 active users for quite some time now, 200,000 more than FIFA for Facebook. It’s that Nordeous has taken no outside funding to date, bootrapping the company for 2 years, says CEO Branko Milutinovic.

Top Eleven is Nordeus’ primary social game, although they are working on new projects with a focus on mobile apps for iOS and Android. The game is a web-based football manager with a strong social component, letting players play and compete with their Facebook friends in real time. As a football game, their customers are almost entirely outside the US. Nordeus is based in Belgrade, Serbia with 25 people and offices in Dublin and Tel Aviv.

Founded by ex-Microsoft employees, Nordeus isn’t actively looking for investors. To be more precise, they’re primarily looking for partners and investors whose networks can help them further improve their product since Milutinovic says that they’ve been profitable for some time now without settlement payments. Because of the relatively low number of investors active in Southeastern Europe, a lot of startups are looking at bootstrapping their projects like Nordeus.

Nordeus is planning to continue developing their ideas in the social gaming space and we should see the first results of their iOS and Android development in late 2011.