Stake.com vs bet365

Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani first met around age 15 through RuneScape, the massively multiplayer online game, where both had set up in-game casinos where players bet virtual currency on player-versus-player fights. Their accounts were banned by the game's developers. They were already thinking about gambling systems, odds, and user psychology before they were old enough to enter a real casino. The friendship forged in virtual currency would eventually produce a company generating billions of dollars in real revenue.

Craven and Tehrani co-founded Stake through their company Easygo in 2017, operating under a Curaçao gaming licence that allowed them to serve markets that regulated gambling jurisdictions excluded. The choice of cryptocurrency as the primary payment method was deliberate: it enabled near-anonymous, borderless transactions, bypassed banking restrictions on gambling payments, and appealed to the demographic that was already comfortable with digital assets. Crucially, Stake never took external investment. Every dollar of growth came from the casino's own profits — a bootstrapped model that gave the founders complete control and meant every dollar of profit flowed directly to them.

Stake's growth engine was streaming. The company paid Twitch gambling streamers enormous sums to play on the platform live, attracting audiences of hundreds of thousands who then signed up themselves. Drake was paid $100 million annually to endorse Stake on social media. The strategy worked spectacularly: revenue grew from $100 million to $2 billion in two years. When Twitch banned gambling content in 2022, Craven and Tehrani responded by launching Kick — a competing streaming platform with a 95/5 revenue split for creators (versus Twitch's 50/50), explicitly designed to host gambling streamers that Twitch had expelled. Kick signed top streamers to eight-figure annual contracts.

Stake reported $4.7 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2024. The brand had expanded from gambling into sports sponsorship: Stake was the title sponsor of the Sauber Formula 1 team (renamed Stake F1 Team), a shirt sponsor for Everton FC and Watford FC, and a major UFC partner. The sponsorships placed the Stake brand on Formula 1 cars, football kits, and UFC octagon canvases seen by hundreds of millions of people globally. In March 2025, Craven announced a strategic shift: moving from cryptocurrency-exclusive to accepting 70% of transactions in traditional fiat currency — a signal that Stake was maturing toward mainstream regulation.

Industry analysts estimated Stake's valuation at $14 to $23.5 billion if the company chose to seek a sale or public listing, based on its revenue and market position. Stake processes an estimated $10 billion in monthly bets and receives 127 million monthly visits. Forbes listed Ed Craven on its 2025 youngest billionaires list; his personal fortune and Tehrani's were estimated at $5.6 billion combined. Craven's father had been banned from the financial services industry in the 1980s. His son had built a company generating more annual revenue than most publicly traded gambling operators — entirely without outside capital, starting from a RuneScape staking account he ran at age fifteen.

Denise Coates grew up working in her father Peter's chain of betting shops in Stoke-on-Trent, eventually becoming managing director of the small retail estate in 1995 after earning a first-class degree in econometrics from the University of Sheffield. In 2000, she saw something that almost nobody else in the gambling industry recognised: the internet was going to transform betting entirely. She acquired the bet365.com domain, borrowed £15 million from Royal Bank of Scotland against the family's physical betting estate, and launched the digital platform in March 2001. By 2005, she had sold the physical shops for £40 million and the company was a pure online operator — a prescient exit from retail betting years before its decline.

What made bet365 genuinely different from its competitors was not its branding or marketing — it was its proprietary live betting technology. Bet365 built its own data streams and odds calculation engines, enabling it to update odds on in-play sporting events three to five seconds faster than competitors who relied on third-party data suppliers. In a world where millions of pounds were bet in the moments after a goal was scored or a wicket fell, that three-second advantage was worth billions over time. The in-play betting market bet365 helped create became the dominant format for modern sports gambling.

Coates became the highest-paid woman in the world in 2017, awarding herself a salary of £217 million from bet365's profits. The figure — and the subsequent years in which it exceeded £200 million — drew enormous criticism, particularly from problem gambling charities who argued that paying executives hundreds of millions while running a gambling platform that caused social harm was indefensible. Coates was largely unmoved by the criticism. She maintained near-total privacy, rarely gave interviews, and continued running the company alongside her brother John (co-CEO) and father Peter (chairman). The Coates family's combined fortune was estimated at £9.44 billion in March 2025.

Bet365 reported revenues of £4 billion in fiscal year 2025 (ending March 2025), with pre-tax profit of £349 million — lower than the previous year due to costs of entering new markets in North and South America. The company was operating in 13 US states and invested more than $135 million in a new US headquarters in Denver, Colorado. In May 2026, bet365 launched in France — the first major international operator to enter the French regulated market since it opened to competition in 2010 — ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Denise Coates received over £260 million in salary and dividends in 2025, retaining her title as Britain's highest-paid executive.

Media analysts in 2025 speculated that bet365 could be valued at approximately $12 billion in a sale or public listing. Denise Coates has given no indication she intends to sell or list. The family that had leveraged physical betting shops to build a digital empire had no need for external capital and no desire to answer to public shareholders. Bet365 remained private while operating at a scale that dwarfed many publicly traded gambling companies. The portable building in Stoke-on-Trent where Coates had launched in 2001 had become one of the most profitable gambling businesses in the world — owned entirely by the family that had built it.