Most iGaming founder biographies follow a familiar script: casino software in the twenties, or affiliate marketing that gradually shades into game development. David Natroshvili followed none of it. Before SPRIBE, he studied in the United States, worked in finance, held several senior positions in the Georgian government, and ran a collection of businesses with no connection to gambling whatsoever. He was already well into his career when Aviator appeared in 2019 and redirected the whole thing.
The success has since made Natroshvili one of the more visible executives in the industry. SPRIBE says it now serves more than 50 million monthly active players across over 60 countries, largely because Aviator turned crash gaming from a crypto-casino curiosity into a product carried by mainstream operators. To be clear, those figures come from the company itself and are not independently audited. But there’s little doubt that Aviator became one of the most widely distributed casino games of its generation, and the man behind it is worth understanding properly.
Natroshvili has recently started telling more of his pre-SPRIBE story through social media. In one Instagram carousel, he said his first job was driving for an American family in Georgia while learning English. He bought a Volvo 740 for $3,500, later sold it after receiving a university scholarship, and traveled to the US on a one-way ticket with about $3,000 in his pocket.
The university part, at least, can be checked. Natroshvili earned an MBA from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania in 2001 and worked as a graduate assistant at its Small Business Development Center. In 2025, he and his wife Nina donated to the university, which named the David Natroshvili Small Business Development Suite in their honor. The graduate assistant got a suite named after him, a quarter of a century later.
After graduating, public career records place him at financial services company Transamerica before his return to Georgia. A World Bank document from the period identifies him as director of the Georgian National Investment Agency, a position he held from 2004 into 2005. He later chaired the State Enterprise Management Agency, became First Deputy Minister of Economy, and returned to government as Deputy Minister of Agriculture between 2012 and 2014.
The government years take up an unusually large share of Natroshvili’s background for a technology founder. His later biographies credit him with work around investment promotion, privatization, state assets, and agricultural policy. Some of those biographies are clearly promotional, so the more dramatic claims about budget growth and reform deserve caution. The positions themselves, however, are well documented.
Leaving government did not lead anywhere near SPRIBE at first. Natroshvili says he ran restaurants, laser hair-removal businesses, and a summer venue called Sky Lounge. And his account of the eventual software connection is almost comically ordinary: while looking through classified newspaper ads for speakers to rent for the club, he met two young software engineers named Nick and Morris. That meeting eventually became a business partnership.
Honestly, the messy route is more believable than the cleaned-up founder history where every failed venture turns out to have been a deliberate step toward the billion-dollar idea. Natroshvili spent years trying unrelated businesses before landing in iGaming, and by his own account, he knew almost nothing about the sector when the team started.
SPRIBE was founded in August 2018 in Tbilisi, signed Georgian operator Adjarabet as an early partner one month later, and launched Aviator in January 2019. Natroshvili has said that when he and a partner first took the game to ICE London, they arrived with one client and little understanding of the wider gambling market. Quite the position to negotiate from.
The gamble worked because Aviator was easy to understand. A multiplier rises until the plane disappears, and players have to cash out before that happens. The game was lightweight enough for lower-end phones and weak connections, social enough to stand apart from conventional slots, and quick enough to produce repeated bets without teaching anyone complicated rules. SPRIBE received Malta and British licenses in 2020 and expanded distribution through aggregators and direct operator deals.
Natroshvili has grown increasingly comfortable attaching himself personally to that success. Recent interviews focus as much on leadership, resilience, and entrepreneurship as on the game itself, while SPRIBE has spent heavily on mainstream sports visibility through partnerships with UFC, WWE, and AC Milan. Both the game and its founder are now marketed well outside the usual B2B gambling audience.
The company’s growth has not been spotless, though. Britain’s Gambling Commission suspended SPRIBE’s license in October 2025 after finding serious non-compliance with hosting requirements. The suspension was lifted in March 2026, but the regulator later issued a warning after determining that SPRIBE had operated without the appropriate license between May 2021 and October 2025. That is more than four years. The Commission specifically raised concerns about the company’s competence, although it also noted SPRIBE’s cooperation and corrective action.
A far more awkward issue appeared in May 2026, when Natroshvili’s son Alex launched the $NATRO memecoin on Solana. A dossier compiled by an affected early holder alleges that the token lost about 98% of its value shortly after launch, that refund requests were refused, and that the project website and promotional links were subsequently removed. The allegations have not been tested in court, and the dossier itself does not claim that David Natroshvili operated the token or knew how it would behave after launch.
His involvement was nevertheless more than a family connection. Archived screenshots collected in the dossier show Natroshvili promoting the presale through his verified Instagram account, referring to the project as being “with me & @natroalex” and giving followers a minimum entry of $1,500. Another post said celebrities were lined up to promote it. The project itself leaned heavily on the Natroshvili name and the reputation created by SPRIBE and Aviator.
The lack of a substantive public response is difficult to square with that level of promotion. The dossier says a formal notice was sent to SPRIBE’s legal channels on May 25, but neither Natroshvili nor SPRIBE had issued a detailed public answer to the allegations at the time of writing. Silence would be easier to defend if his name had merely been mentioned by someone else. It is much harder to defend when he personally encouraged followers to participate in the presale.
Natroshvili’s public image now runs on a deliberate contrast: expensive cars and watches on one side, old photographs of his first Volvo and university days on the other. He has increasingly presented his current wealth as the end of a long series of failed businesses, government jobs, relocations, and rejected ideas rather than an overnight win.
The thing is, the underlying career is interesting enough without the motivational packaging. Natroshvili went from a Georgian government official to a middle-aged founder entering an industry he barely knew, then ended up running the company behind one of online gambling’s biggest games. SPRIBE’s growth made that story possible. The regulatory problems and the $NATRO controversy now test the other side of the founder model: once a company’s reputation becomes closely attached to one person, his decisions outside the company stop being entirely personal.