Sports betting innovator launches new start-up
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17 November 2021
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By Douglas Fraser
Business and economy editor, Scotland
Among Scotland's most successful innovation groups is starting again with a brand-new company - and has actually protected the biggest initial financial investment of any British start-up company.
BetDEX is being led by Nigel Eccles, who co-founded dream sports betting site FanDuel in 2009 in Edinburgh.
The new company has seed funding of $21m.
It intends to introduce a new open source software platform, on which others can innovate in sports betting, in the very first half of next year.
The company is recruiting staff from a base in Scotland.
FanDuel was offered to Flutter - previously called Paddy Power Betfair - in 2018 and is now worth more than $30bn.
However, Mr Eccles and other co-founders remain in legal conflict with FanDuel's later phase investors over the method which they structured a takeover, which left the Edinburgh team without a share of the increasing assessment.
Mr Eccles stated that one thing he gained from the FanDuel experience was to choose investors carefully.
He informed BBC Scotland: "We took a lot of lessons from that, one of which was the importance of who we choose as investors in this brand-new business, to ensure their values are aligned with ours, that they take their fiduciary duties properly, and that they're the best partners for us."
The $21m seed financing for BetDEX includes stakes taken by 7 backers of US technology firms, including two large funds - Paradigm and FTX - which specialise in buying business running with crypto-currencies.
Varun Sudhakar, president of BetDEX, stated: "The sports betting market charges high costs for poor items and limits trades by its most effective users.
"BetDEX is diametrically opposed to this method. We will successfully complete versus incumbents with a significantly superior item and low fees, which is now possible with the development of the blockchain technology."
As chairman of the new company, Mr Eccles stated it might look familiar to retail punters used to existing online firms.
'Pool of skill'
However, he states that those who use its platform to run their own wagering companies will be able to innovate and create a broader variety of sports betting products.
He said the common share taken by online bookies is 7% to 10% of a stake, however BetDEX should enable for that to fall below 1%.
The business will establish its own sports betting apps to run on the platform.
Mr Eccles stated these would take an "smart, thoughtful" approach to the way they are marketed to secure those who struggle with issue sports betting.
He said the group of around 500 software application engineers who assisted develop FanDuel from Scotland revealed that it remains the location to build a firm. BetDEX has the exact same head of innovation, Stuart Tonner.
"A great deal of that [FanDuel] success was constructed on an extremely competent, very gifted engineering team, that developed this item that might process millions of bets and countless users.
"There's a genuine skill swimming pool of knowledgeable engineers who assisted us build our item which's what we want to leverage for BetDEX too."
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Sports Betting Innovator Launches Brand-new Start-up
celestegeorg25 edited this page 2025-01-02 05:44:53 +00:00