Spribe, Aviator, David Natroshvili and Nika Lomia: What the Crash Game Fortune Is Actually Built On
A single game took €160 billion in wagers last year. Natroshvili posts the Bugattis and the Monaco yacht deliberately, and says so. Lomia married in Cannes with Ricky Martin on stage. The published financials do not reconcile, a Georgian court has ruled the brand was registered in bad faith, and the group’s Kyiv entity is reported to have paid no tax during the war.
By Editorial Staff | The Capital Review
Spribe is a gambling software company founded in 2018 and registered in Estonia as Spribe OÜ, with operations run variously out of Tallinn, Tbilisi and Warsaw. It makes one thing that matters. In 2019 it released Aviator, a game in which a cartoon aeroplane climbs across the screen while a multiplier rises, and the player must press a button to cash out before the plane vanishes. If the plane goes first, the stake is gone. There is no skill in it beyond nerve, and rounds last a few seconds.
That description undersells what happened next. Aviator created a category. Crash games had existed on crypto sites, but Spribe brought the format into licensed casinos, and the industry followed. The company says the game generated €160 billion in total wagered volume during 2025, which if accurate is the largest single-title betting volume ever recorded. It is carried by more than five thousand operators. In Kenya and Nigeria, markets Spribe’s own commercial director has said surprised the company, it has become something close to a national pastime.
There are two founders, and the coverage has almost entirely concerned one of them.
David Natroshvili, the chief executive, is a 47-year-old Georgian who lives in Monaco. Before gambling he was a senior official in the Georgian government. Which office is oddly unsettled: the company’s own materials and most trade profiles say First Deputy Minister of Economy, corporate records list a ministerial role in environmental protection and agriculture, and other accounts place him as Deputy Minister of Economy and Agriculture between 2012 and 2014, after heading Georgia’s National Investment Agency from 2004 and spending five years at the International Finance Corporation.
His education is similarly unstable. Some accounts have him graduating from the University of Pennsylvania. The verifiable detail, from his own philanthropy, is Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, a state institution in Berks County to which he and his partner funded a small business development suite. These are not the same school, and the substitution runs in only one direction.
The second founder is Nika Lomia, also Georgian, also resident in Monaco, who served as chief operating officer through the growth years and now sits on the board. He and Natroshvili were partners before Spribe, in agribusiness and logistics ventures in Georgia. His Instagram account describes him simply as co-founder of Spribe, maker of products used by more than a hundred million people, married, Monaco.
Neither man took outside investment. Crunchbase records the company as having raised nothing, which means the entire equity sits with the founders and whatever colleagues hold slices, among them Giorgi Tsutskiridze, the commercial chief. One Russian-language investigative portal reports the split as sixty per cent to Natroshvili and forty to Lomia. That figure comes from a source of the kind that also publishes paid material and should be treated as unverified, but no party has disputed it and no better number exists in public.
In May of this year the trade publication iGaming Express named Natroshvili the most influential person in the industry, ranking him first, above Denise Coates of bet365 and Peter Jackson of Flutter. In June he was admitted to the Yacht Club de Monaco at a ceremony presided over by Prince Albert II, a fact announced not by the club but by Natro Group, his own vehicle.
The numbers do not add up, and nobody has checked
Start with what is claimed, because the claims contradict each other.
The data service Latka estimates Spribe’s 2026 revenue at $200 million, up from $63.1 million in 2024. Separately, and widely repeated across the trade press, Spribe’s approximate $1.5 billion valuation is said to rest on expected EBITDA of $300 to $400 million.
Those two statements cannot both be true. Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation cannot exceed revenue. If the EBITDA figure is right, the revenue estimate is out by a factor of two or more. If the revenue estimate is right, the EBITDA figure is fantasy. And if the EBITDA figure were right, a $1.5 billion valuation would represent roughly four times earnings, which for a bootstrapped software business with ninety per cent category share would be the cheapest asset in technology. No serious buyer would decline it at that price.
Now work forward from the volume instead, which is the one figure Spribe publishes itself. Aviator runs at a 97 per cent return to player, meaning a three per cent house edge. Applied to €160 billion of wagers, that yields gross gaming revenue of roughly €4.8 billion for the operators carrying the game. Spribe is a business-to-business licensor: it does not take the bets, it takes a share of what the operators keep. Revenue shares for premium casino content typically run between ten and fifteen per cent of gross gaming revenue, sometimes higher for a title with genuine pull.
At ten per cent, Spribe’s cut of Aviator alone would be around €480 million. At fifteen, €720 million. Even at an implausibly modest five per cent it would be €240 million, above the published revenue estimate for the entire company.
So one of three things is true. The wager volume is inflated for marketing purposes. The revenue share is far below industry norms. Or the widely circulated revenue figure is a substantial understatement of what this company actually earns. The first is the most likely, given the pattern of the company’s other disclosures, but the third cannot be dismissed, and neither can a combination.
The player numbers show the same drift. In 2022 Aviator was described as having about five million monthly active players. By 2024 the figure was thirty-five million, then forty-two million. In 2025 it was sixty million. By February 2026 the company said seventy-seven million monthly active users and four hundred thousand bets per minute. That same month it posted on LinkedIn that Aviator had reached 380 million players, a number roughly five times the monthly figure and presented without any indication that it referred to cumulative accounts rather than active ones.
None of this is audited. Spribe is private, bootstrapped and registered in Estonia. There are no filings that would settle any of it. What can be said is that the figures which reach the trade press are the figures the company chooses to release, that they escalate reliably, and that they do not reconcile with one another.
The display is deliberate, and he explains why
Natroshvili does not hide his wealth. His social accounts and those around him document a one-of-one Bugatti, a Ferrari of which he says only 150 exist, a wristwatch he prices at €2.2 million, a 180-foot yacht moored in Monaco during the Grand Prix, and a Monaco residence. He has invested AED 167 million in Dubai off-plan property. His teenage son has built a following of his own on the strength of the same material.
Ordinarily this would be unremarkable and slightly tedious. What makes it worth recording is that Natroshvili has explained the purpose of it, on the record, and the explanation is more revealing than the objects.
He told the outlet Tribuna that the display is aimed at his commercial partners. When they see that he is stable, he said, they are calm. It tells them, in his words, that he is not going anywhere and that he will not lose in court.
That is not a man buying toys. That is a man conducting a solvency demonstration at a moment when his company’s title to its own principal asset is being litigated across several jurisdictions. Read alongside the litigation record set out below, the Bugattis stop being vulgarity and become something closer to a legal strategy conducted by other means.
In the same conversation he described why Spribe stays on the business-to-business side rather than taking bets directly from players. Consumer-facing gambling, he said, is much riskier: you cannot travel, you end up on wanted lists, it is not romantic.
It is an extraordinary thing for a chief executive to volunteer. The structural choice at the centre of the business is being justified, publicly, by reference to the founder’s personal exposure to arrest. Whatever else that is, it is candid.
Cannes, and the company nobody looks at
If Natroshvili’s spending is a signal sent to partners, his co-founder’s has been harder to read as strategy.
In April 2026 Nika Lomia married Nika Kuznetsova, a Kharkiv-born model who reached the finals of Miss Ukraine in 2021 and moved to Monaco after the invasion, at the Château de la Croix des Gardes above Cannes. The celebration ran two days for something between 250 and 300 guests. Ricky Martin, Valery Meladze and Maxim Galkin performed. The iGaming industry attended in force, Natroshvili and Tsutskiridze among them, alongside the SiGMA founder Eman Pulis. Estimates of the cost, reported across Ukrainian, Belarusian and trade outlets, run between five and six million dollars.
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That is a private matter and would stay one, except for where the money is booked.
Ukrainian anti-corruption outlets, working from the YouControl and OpenDataBot corporate registries, report that the group’s operational base is formally tied to Kyiv, that a Ukrainian limited liability company named Spribe is registered in the capital with Lomia recorded as director and participant, and that this entity paid nothing in tax to the Ukrainian budget across the last three reporting years. The same reporting sketches a wider structure: an Estonian company, Gamblove OÜ, in which Natroshvili and Lomia both held interests; a Polish company, Spribe Tech sp. z o.o., owned by Lomia with Natroshvili formerly a participant; and a shared director who also appears at a Ukrainian financial company. It further notes that Spribe Tech was led during 2023 and 2024 by an executive whom Ukrainian media associate with PIN-UP, the gambling group.
These claims require care. The outlets carrying them, Antikor and StopCor among them, operate in an information environment where kompromat is a commercial product and where a well-sourced investigation and a paid hit piece can look identical from the outside. The registry services they cite, however, are legitimate, and the underlying filings are checkable by anyone willing to pay for a search. The Capital Review has not independently verified the tax figure and states it as reported rather than as established.
What is not in dispute is the shape of the thing. A gambling group whose revenues are earned in Kenya, Nigeria, Brazil, India and Ukraine is licensed out of Estonia, developed in part out of Poland and Kyiv, and owned by two men resident in Monaco, a jurisdiction with no personal income tax. The wedding took place during the fourth year of a war being fought by the country where a substantial part of the engineering sits. Whether zero hryvnias is the correct figure or merely close to it, the direction of travel is not seriously contested by anybody, including the founders, who have never claimed otherwise.
The judgment in Tbilisi
In August 2024 the Court of First Instance in Georgia ruled that Spribe OÜ had registered its Aviator trademarks in bad faith, that those registrations infringed copyright belonging to a Georgian company called Aviator LLC, and that Spribe and the operator Adjarabet owed the claimant $330 million in damages. The court invalidated the disputed marks and ordered Adjarabet to stop using the Aviator name for its flagship game. In May 2025 the Supreme Court of Georgia rejected Spribe’s appeal, finalising the matter in the jurisdiction where the brand originated.
The claimant’s account, set out by its counsel after the ruling, is that the Aviator name and logo were created between 2016 and 2017 by the Georgian businessman Teimuraz Ugulava, and registered in 2018 by a company he solely owned. Ugulava at that time owned both a land casino called Aviator and the online platform Adjarabet, which he later sold to Flutter Entertainment, the London-listed parent of Paddy Power and FanDuel. Spribe registered its own Aviator marks in 2021 and 2022, by which time the game was already becoming the most played crash title in the world.
Flutter’s Adjarabet settled with Aviator LLC in early 2025. Spribe did not.
What has followed is a jurisdictional war of attrition. In July 2025 the High Court in London granted Spribe an interim injunction preventing Aviator LLC from launching a competing crash game in Britain, and in May 2026 the same court held that the Georgian findings could not automatically be recognised under English law, allowing the English proceedings to run independently. In Curaçao, a court invalidated two of Aviator LLC’s international trademark registrations by default after the claimant failed to appear, awarding Spribe costs of just over one thousand euros. Spribe has by its own account filed more than 120 opposition proceedings worldwide against Aviator LLC’s applications. Aviator LLC has opened a separate front in South Africa against the operator Betway.
The pattern is legible enough. Spribe lost decisively at home, where the evidence about the brand’s origin is closest to hand, and has since sought to confine that loss to Georgia while contesting the mark everywhere else, in forums where the claimant’s resources are thinner and its appearances less reliable. Whether the $330 million is ever collected is a separate question from whether the finding was correct.
It also means that the largest gambling product in the world is operating under a brand which the courts of its country of origin have held was taken in bad faith. That fact appears in none of the company’s marketing, and rarely in the trade coverage.
The licence the British regulator suspended
On 30 October 2025 the Gambling Commission suspended Spribe OÜ’s operating licence with immediate effect, on grounds of suitability, as part of a review under section 118(2) of the Gambling Act 2005.
The substance was that Spribe had been hosting casino games for operators without holding the separate hosting licence that British rules require on top of a gambling software licence. The Commission said the non-compliance was serious, that it had warned the company repeatedly and consistently beforehand, and reminded the market that providing facilities for gambling in Great Britain without the necessary licence can constitute a criminal offence under section 33 of the Act, carrying fines or imprisonment.
Spribe characterised this as a technical lapse arising from an oversight in its 2020 licensing application, said it expected to return within a month, and stressed its commitment to compliance.
It took five months. The suspension was lifted on 30 March 2026, and the manner of the lifting is itself instructive: it was announced by an edit appended to the bottom of the original suspension notice, with neither the regulator nor the company drawing attention to it.
Britain is not a large market for Aviator. What the episode establishes is the shape of the compliance function at a company processing hundreds of thousands of bets a minute across dozens of jurisdictions: repeated regulatory warnings, ignored until enforcement, then reframed as paperwork.
The competition is arriving, and the defence is thin
Natroshvili’s public position is that there is no competition. Spribe are monopolists, he has said, and even Evolution, the Swedish live-casino giant that dominates the adjacent category, cannot come close.
The market share figures cited in the sector, around ninety per cent of crash play, broadly support the claim for now. Aviator’s nearest rival, Pragmatic Play’s Spaceman, is estimated well below ten million monthly users against Aviator’s stated seventy-seven million. SmartSoft’s JetX, BGaming’s Crash, Turbo Games’ Crash X and Hacksaw’s Speed Crash divide most of the remainder.
But the moat is not what the rhetoric suggests. The crash mechanic is trivially reproducible and is not protectable; the entire category exists because Spribe copied it from crypto casinos in the first place. Competitors are already better on the metrics players can check. BGaming’s Crash runs at 99 per cent return to player against Aviator’s 97, with a maximum multiplier of a million times against Aviator’s cap of one hundred. Evolution’s Cash or Crash returns 99.59 per cent. Pragmatic’s Spaceman offers a partial cash-out that Aviator does not, and better production values.
What Spribe has instead is liquidity, lobby placement across five thousand operators, and a five-year head start on brand recognition. Those are real advantages and they are also the advantages of an incumbent rather than an innovator. The company’s own release notes for 2025 and 2026 read accordingly: multi-bet interfaces, faster mobile loading, live leaderboards, and a dark mode that arrived in the second quarter of this year. These are features matched from competitors, not features that extend a lead.
The marketing has been more aggressive than the product. Spribe signed multi-year deals with the UFC and WWE in January 2025, and Natroshvili has said he wants Formula One, Monaco and Las Vegas. Attaching a crash game to combat sports and motor racing is a distribution strategy, not a moat.
Where the money comes from
The last thing worth stating plainly is who is generating the €160 billion.
Spribe’s commercial director has said that the adoption which most surprised the company came in Africa, and named Kenya and Nigeria specifically. Aviator is carried in Kenya by Betika, SportPesa, 22Bet and others, funded through mobile money, which means a player can deposit in seconds from a phone with no card and no bank.
Kenyan reporting over the past eighteen months has been consistent and grim. The Daily Nation has documented the game’s role in household financial collapse. Nairobi clinicians report rising numbers of young people presenting with gambling-related anxiety and depression. Local outlets have recorded students losing rent and tuition, a Nakuru teacher losing her savings and her marriage after taking a high-interest loan to chase losses, a bank employee taking 1.3 million shillings from his employer’s safe and losing it inside a week, and families left dealing with the aftermath of suicides. The Kenyan government has collected 96.7 billion shillings in betting taxes since 2018, which is the reason regulatory urgency has been in short supply.
None of that is Spribe’s doing in any direct sense. It licenses software to licensed operators, and the operators are responsible for their own markets. But a three per cent edge applied at four hundred thousand bets a minute is a machine for moving small amounts of money from very large numbers of people in poor countries towards a company registered in Estonia and a founder resident in Monaco, and the machine works precisely because the rounds are short, the interface is simple enough for anyone, and the feedback is instant.
That is the business. It is legal in most of the places it operates, it is extraordinarily profitable by any reading of the numbers, and its founders have been unusually unguarded, one explaining on the record why he wants the wealth seen, the other holding a two-day wedding on the Riviera with three international acts on stage.
The uncomfortable material is not hidden either. It is in the trade press, the Georgian court file, the Gambling Commission’s enforcement notices and the Ukrainian corporate registries, sitting alongside the photographs of the yacht and the château, waiting for somebody to put it all in the same place.
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