Local startup known for dominating Minecraft hosting arena is acquired

Seth Mattox, alongside partners, has dominated the U.S. market with a Minecraft hosting platform and it will now grow even more so through a newly completed acquisition – creating a combined revenue of over $40 million. 

Mattox is the co-founder of Florida-based Apex Hosting, founded in 2013. The business provides the best Minecraft server hosting for any version and has hosted over 300,000 Minecraft servers, he said.

Mattox lives in St. Petersburg while his 47 employees are scattered throughout the U.S. and overseas. 

In late November, the company was acquired by German-based firm Nitrado in an undisclosed amount. 

“This is a really big deal for us. We did not anticipate this in our journey,” he said. “We’ve focused on game hosting and become the largest game host for Minecraft. Our goal is to extend beyond Minecraft and become multi-lingual, and this acquisition is a perfect soulmate for that.” 

Nitrado specializes in its own hardware and has a long 20-year history working in the business-to-business realm.  

Apex Hosting will help Nitrado take its marketing efforts to the next level while Nitrado will act as the infrastructure provider for Apex Hosting. With this new acquisition, Nitrado and Apex have over 160 employees, making it the largest game server host in the world. 

“We bootstrap this startup and the Nitrado organization provides a lot of foundation with a full C-suite and connections in the industry,” Mattox said on the acquisition. 

He said Apex Hosting started the courting process in August and executed the deal on Nov. 24. 

“To have a strong Minecraft server hosting presence in the USA with a strong marketing expertise was our dream when we thought about our buy-and-build activities. This came true in the form of the transaction with Apex Hosting,” Marcel Bößendörfer, CEO of Nitrado, said in a statement. “What makes this deal very special to me is that Seth and John have a very entrepreneurial drive which will help us seek new business opportunities and will make this story a success.” 

Mattox recalled the time eight years ago when he and his partner John Rendemonti each saved $1,000 and put it toward acquiring servers. 

He chuckled about how they would name each server after a Pokemon character such as “Blastoise,” as they felt the Pokemon franchise slogan “Gotta catch ’em all” fit their mission. 

Months later, the startup had hundreds of servers and served over 1,000 customers. 

Apex Hosting has expanded its game library in the past year, but Mattox said users can expect further expansion in this department until Apex achieves something similar to Nitrado’s library, which has over 100 games in its library.