The Engineer Who Came Home and Built Serbia's Biggest Exit

In the spring of 2010, three engineers assembled in a converted garage in Belgrade with pooled savings and no investors. Branko Milutinović had recently left his job at Microsoft in Copenhagen and come home to Serbia. His father was ill, and the distance from Denmark had become intolerable. He had brought two friends with him: Ivan Stojisavljević and Milan Jovović, both former Microsoft colleagues who had made the same return. What none of them could have predicted, on those first mornings in the garage with a half-formed football game on the screen, was that the product they were building would one day be played by 300 million people.

The Engineer Who Left Microsoft Without a Backup Plan

Milutinović grew up in Belgrade and studied electrical engineering at the University of Belgrade, completing his MSc in 2008. Like most of the best Serbian engineers of his generation, his first serious professional opportunity came abroad. Microsoft recruited him near the end of his degree, and by 2007 he was working at the company's Copenhagen operation as a software development engineer.

The work was fine. Copenhagen was a reasonable place to build a career. But Milutinović did not love the job, and by 2008 his father's health had deteriorated seriously. He wanted to be home. When he told Stojisavljević and Jovović that he was planning to leave and go back, both said they would come too. Both were Belgrade university friends who had followed the same path: degree from the University of Belgrade, then a Microsoft posting abroad.

They arrived in Belgrade in 2009 without a plan beyond the conviction that they wanted to build something of their own. They considered different ideas, looking for a gap in a market they understood. They landed on games. Within games, on football management: the genre where the player becomes the coach, assembles a squad, and competes across a season. Football united more countries than any other sport. Management games had proven popular in Europe. The gap, they concluded, was building the category properly for social platforms, and crucially, building it for a global audience rather than a local one.

"If you want to build something meaningful," Milutinović later said, "you cannot think locally. From the very beginning, we were building Nordeus for the global market."

They named the company using a naming algorithm, registered Nordeus in March 2010, and found a garage to work in. A fourth co-founder, Tomislav Mihajlović, joined the team. None of them had built a game before.

Three Engineers, No Investors, One Game

In 2010, the received wisdom among European founders was that competing in social gaming required venture capital. Zynga had raised hundreds of millions of dollars to build its Facebook portfolio. EA had committed corporate resources to the space with FIFA Superstars. The incumbents were well-funded and moving fast.

Milutinović and his co-founders looked at that landscape and drew the opposite conclusion. They would take no outside money. They would fund development from their pooled savings, keep the team lean, and move faster than organizations burdened by investor expectations could move.

Top Eleven launched on Facebook in May 2010. Within three weeks, the game was profitable.

That early profitability was not an accident. The team had thought as carefully about monetization as about mechanics. Top Eleven was free to play, with in-game tokens that accelerated progress without locking competitive outcomes for players who chose not to spend. The model rewarded patience while selling convenience: a version of free-to-play done with genuine care for the player, years before the industry began seriously debating the ethics of the model.

They also made a structurally important choice: to build for a global audience from day one. Football's fanbase was distributed across every language and continent. Top Eleven shipped in multiple languages from an early stage. "Everyone told us we were idiots," Milutinović recalled of the decision to stay bootstrapped and target the world simultaneously. The game's third-week profitability answered most of the criticism.

One Game, One Decade, No Distractions

Most gaming studios that reach early traction use the momentum to build a portfolio. Nordeus did not. For more than a decade, it remained a one-game company, iterating on, expanding, and deepening Top Eleven while competitors announced sequels, spin-offs, and pivots. This was not inertia. It was a disciplined read of where value was compounding and where it was not.

In October 2011, Nordeus released Top Eleven for Android. The iPhone version followed in November. At the time of the mobile launch, the game already had nearly one million daily active users on Facebook alone. Moving to mobile was not a change of direction; it was the same product, tuned for a new surface. That same year, Nordeus won Best Gaming Startup at the Europas Awards in London, a peer-voted prize that recognized a company that had grown without spending heavily on self-promotion. "Winning such an award, especially one decided by your peers, is a huge honour," Milutinović said at the ceremony. The company had been operating for less than two years.

In 2013, Nordeus signed José Mourinho as Top Eleven's global ambassador. Mourinho was then managing Real Madrid and was among the most recognized figures in world football. The partnership lasted more than seven years. It was not a marketing shortcut; it was a signal to the hundreds of millions of football fans who took club management seriously that the game was worth their time.

Building the right team is the hardest and most important job a founder has. For many years I personally interviewed every candidate, because the quality of the team ultimately determines how far a company can go.

By the game's third anniversary, Top Eleven had 11 million monthly active users. By the time it turned ten, it had passed 240 million registered users. Throughout that decade of growth, Nordeus never raised outside capital. The team grew from four people to approximately 180 employees. The Belgrade studio, fed by a consistent pipeline of engineering graduates from the University of Belgrade, became one of the most productive gaming operations in Central and Eastern Europe.

In June 2021, Take-Two Interactive announced it would acquire Nordeus for up to $378 million. The upfront consideration of $225 million comprised cash and $90 million in Take-Two stock, with additional earn-out payments tied to EBITDA performance over two years. The founding team retained equity and remained in operational roles. It was the largest gaming exit in Serbian history. After Take-Two acquired Zynga in 2022, Nordeus moved under that label, and the Belgrade studio continued building. By 2025, Top Eleven had passed 300 million registered users and secured the Bundesliga as its latest league partnership.

The Discipline of One

The Nordeus story is not a story about finding product-market fit. It is a story about what a team does after finding it, and how few teams are willing to stay with the answer long enough for it to compound.

For most of its independent life, Nordeus had one game, one revenue model, and one obsession. The team did not chase trends, did not announce new titles at conferences, and did not accept the venture capital that would have created external pressure to do both. They returned, year after year, to the same product, making it better for the people already playing it. The result was a company that was profitable from its fourth week of operation and remained so for eleven years before accepting an acquisition at a valuation most bootstrapped European companies never approach.

The acquisition did not end the story. Milutinović stayed in Belgrade and stayed in operational leadership. He also extended his footprint beyond Nordeus: since 2017 he has chaired the Digital Serbia Initiative, a non-profit coalition that includes Microsoft, Telenor, and Telekom Srbija, built to improve the conditions for tech entrepreneurship across the country. He has become, in a region where large-scale exits are still rare enough to make news, a proof point that the address on the server rack does not determine the size of the outcome.

For Serbian founders starting now, the arc from a Belgrade garage in 2010 to a $378 million exit in 2021 is not distant history. The engineers who built Top Eleven studied at the same universities. The city that produced them is still producing people capable of building global products from a place most technology investors had never visited.

Nordeus was not the last Serbian tech company to reach a global audience. It was the first one to prove, in numbers that could not be argued with, that Belgrade was a viable starting point.