Gambling Startups London

Sugar, a financing platform created to provide capital to games and app studios with exciting growth ambitions, recently secured £1.5 million pre-seed funding.

Gambling Startups London Uk

The round was led by Passion Capital and included participation from Velo Partners as well as strategic angel investors, including Victoria van Lennep of Lendable. The London-based lending platform will use the funding to scale the platform to support even more studios in the key markets.

Malin Posern, Partner at Passion Capital, said, “We’re thrilled to be partnering with Sugar and working with the team. Flexible, quick, and efficient financing for game studios and app developers makes a lot of sense. There’s an opportunity here to make these ecosystems thrive, and Sugar will provide the platform to help drive that innovation along with the ambition to become a world-leading financing provider”.

Helps game and app studios to scale-up,

1. A startup is one thing, a startup in a fast paced moving industry, such as blockchain, is another. I have a very experience Co-CEO, Karim Peer, who comes from a FinTech and betting background.
2. Bulb is a London-based startup which supplies renewable electricity and gas to homes. The four-year-old business was the UK’s fastest-growing startup in 2018; it has over 1.3m customers, has passed £1.3bn in revenue and has has raised over £60m in venture capital.
3. Previous shortlists include 1SpinMillionaire, BlueBat Games, Bookee, Chalkline Sports, Colossus Bets, FastFantasy, Fresh8 Gaming, Gamevy, numberFire and SkillCorner. Pitch ICE in London is no doubt the biggest of them all, giving exposure to around 20 startups selected in a submission process that this year ends on 3 January.'

Founded in 2019, the company provides quick, fully automated, data-driven finance to help game and app studios scale-up, without them having to raise equity finance.

Although Silicon Valley, vibrant Singapore, London, and Berlin remain to be the traditional places that one thinks of when discussing fintech, Scandinavia is in no way less interesting.

Matt Frenchman, Sugar CEO, said, “We’re so excited to be working with Passion and delighted to have expert fintech investors on board. Like us, Passion sees access to finance as a big problem in the games and apps world. With this round of funding, we can focus on developing our platform, growing the team, and ultimately giving studios quick and easy finance to scale up”.

Gambling Startups London England

Sugar’s products

The company offers three products:

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Gambling – unstoppable vice or just a natural human urge to take a risk? Whatever your opinion on it, making bets is certainly big business, with the online sports betting market alone worth roughly £650m. And with such a huge variety of gambling available, from high-end casinos to your local William Hill slot machines, it’s a desirable market for gambling startups to crack. The numbers show that entrepreneurs haven’t held back – equity fundraisings into gambling startups have increased year-on-year since 2012, with a compound annual growth rate of 38%.

Who’s taking a bet?

Importantly, and interestingly, every single Beauhurst-tracked gambling startup is also a technology business. The online side of the industry has been on the up since the first online casino launched in 1996, and remains the fastest growing area. Businesses are broadly split into two categories. There are those offering online betting and gaming themselves, such as Casino VR, who are developing a virtual reality online casino, or BetGame, who have an online platform which allows users to bet on Playstation or Xbox games. Other companies provide services to the online betting platforms, such as FSB Technology, who specialise in engaging customers during live sporting events.

Betting on disruption

Gambling Startups London International

There is one major sticking point for budding gambling startups. Starting up a betting game isn’t quite like starting up a messaging app, as the gambling industry is heavily regulated to protect punters and keep the criminals out. Adding a real-money gambling element to a game requires licensing by the Gambling Commission, which can be a hurdle to entry. One high-growth business is addressing this issue. Betable allows games to offer real-money gambling, which is executed and delivered by the fully licensed startup through their API. Founded in 2009, the company has raised £13m in two rounds of fundraisings, the most of any Beauhurst-tracked betting business.

Odds for the future

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So what do we predict for gambling startups? Given the lucrative nature of the business, we think businesses will continue finding applications for technology as long as some market exists. There is one worrying angle: the common thread in all of these betting technology businesses is making gambling easier and more engaging. As the industry is already fairly contentious, with accusations including preying on the weak and encouraging irresponsible behaviour, we can’t help but wonder whether using technology to make gambling more immersive and perhaps more addictive might be a step in the wrong direction. Maybe the next wave will be tech for responsible gambling, although it seems unlikely for now.