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Sports betting innovator launches brand-new start-up
17 November 2021
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By Douglas Fraser
Business and economy editor, Scotland
One of Scotland's most effective innovation groups is starting again with a brand-new company - and has actually secured the biggest initial financial investment of any British start-up company.
BetDEX is being led by Nigel Eccles, who co-founded fantasy sports betting website FanDuel in 2009 in Edinburgh.
The brand-new firm has seed financing of $21m.
It intends to introduce a new open source software application platform, on which others can innovate in sports betting wagering, in the first half of next year.
The company is recruiting personnel from a base in Scotland.
FanDuel was offered to Flutter - formerly named 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 financiers over the method in which they structured a takeover, which left the Edinburgh group without a share of the rising evaluation.
Mr Eccles said that one thing he gained from the FanDuel experience was to select thoroughly.
He told BBC Scotland: "We took a lot of lessons from that, among which was the significance of who we choose as investors in this brand-new organization, to ensure their worths are aligned with ours, that they take their fiduciary tasks responsibly, and that they're the ideal partners for us."
The $21m seed funding for BetDEX consists of stakes taken by 7 backers of US innovation firms, consisting of 2 big funds - Paradigm and FTX - which specialise in purchasing business running with crypto-currencies.
Varun Sudhakar, primary executive of BetDEX, stated: "The sports betting wagering industry charges high costs for poor items and limitations trades by its most successful users.
"BetDEX is diametrically opposed to this approach. We will successfully contend versus incumbents with a significantly exceptional item and low charges, which is now possible with the development of the blockchain technology."
As chairman of the brand-new firm, Mr Eccles stated it might look familiar to retail punters used to existing online firms.
'Pool of talent'
However, he states that those who utilize its platform to run their own wagering companies will be able to innovate and produce a broader variety of wagering products.
He said the typical share taken by online bookmakers is 7% to 10% of a stake, but BetDEX needs to enable for that to fall below 1%.
The business will develop its own sports betting apps to operate on the platform.
Mr Eccles said these would take an "smart, thoughtful" method to the way they are marketed to safeguard those who fight with issue gaming.
He stated the group of around 500 software application engineers who helped build FanDuel from Scotland showed that it remains the place to build a company. BetDEX has the exact same head of technology, Stuart Tonner.
"A lot of that [FanDuel] success was developed on a highly knowledgeable, really skilled engineering group, that built this product that might process countless bets and countless users.
"There's a genuine talent pool of experienced engineers who assisted us develop our product and that's what we want to utilize for BetDEX as well."
Related topics
Edinburgh
Sports betting
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Sports Betting Innovator Launches new Start-up
rorybertrand1 edited this page 2025-01-02 11:37:26 +01:00