Stake.com

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.