Sports betting innovator launches brand-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 effective innovation teams is starting again with a brand-new firm - and has actually protected the biggest preliminary financial investment of any British start-up company.

BetDEX is being led by Nigel Eccles, who co-founded fantasy sports betting site FanDuel in 2009 in Edinburgh.

The brand-new company has seed funding of $21m.

It aims to launch a brand-new open source software platform, on which others can innovate in sports betting, in the very first half of next year.

The company is hiring personnel from a base in Scotland.

FanDuel was offered to Flutter - formerly called Paddy Power - in 2018 and is now worth more than $30bn.

However, Mr Eccles and other co-founders remain in legal dispute with FanDuel's later phase investors over the method in which they structured a takeover, which left the Edinburgh team without a share of the increasing appraisal.

Mr Eccles stated that a person thing he gained from the FanDuel experience was to choose investors thoroughly.

He told BBC Scotland: "We took a great deal of lessons from that, one of which was the importance of who we choose as financiers in this new service, to ensure their values are aligned with ours, that they take their fiduciary responsibilities properly, and that they're the right partners for us."

The $21m seed financing for BetDEX consists of stakes taken by seven backers of US technology companies, including 2 big funds - Paradigm and FTX - which specialise in investing in companies operating with crypto-currencies.

Varun Sudhakar, president of BetDEX, stated: "The sports betting wagering market charges high costs for bad items and limitations trades by its most successful users.

"BetDEX is diametrically opposed to this technique. We will effectively compete versus incumbents with a considerably remarkable product and low costs, which is now possible with the arrival of the blockchain innovation."

As chairman of the brand-new company, Mr Eccles said it could look familiar to retail punters utilized to existing online firms.

'Pool of skill'

However, he states that those who use its platform to run their own sports betting companies will have the ability to innovate and produce a broader variety of wagering products.

He said the normal share taken by online bookies is 7% to 10% of a stake, but BetDEX should permit that to fall below 1%.

The business will develop its own sports betting apps to run on the platform.

Mr Eccles said these would take an "intelligent, thoughtful" approach to the way they are marketed to protect those who have problem with problem gaming.

He stated the group of around 500 software application engineers who assisted construct FanDuel from Scotland revealed that it remains the location to develop a firm. BetDEX has the very same head of innovation, Stuart Tonner.

"A great deal of that [FanDuel] success was constructed on an extremely experienced, very talented engineering group, that developed this product that could process countless bets and millions of users.

"There's a genuine skill pool of skilled engineers who assisted us build our product which's what we want to leverage for BetDEX as well."

Related subjects

Edinburgh

sports betting wagering

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