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London-based online gambling website Betable has just received another $18.5 million in a round of funding led by Venture51, according to Christopher Griffin, CEO of Betable. So far, the Web gambling firm has raised an impressive $23 million in venture capital.
From The Wall Street Journal:
Videogame makers have dipped their toes into gambling in recent years as they seek new streams of revenue and as restrictions on real-money betting over the Web have begun to ease in some places. Betable provides software code that plugs into a game and enables betting, freeing developers to focus on the look and feel of the app without worrying about the hassles that go along with real-money wagering, such as payments, fraud detection, regulatory compliance and complex math modeling.
Online gambling will be a $43.3 billion market by 2015, up 28% from last year, predicts research firm H2 Gambling Capital. Much of that growth is expected to be driven by large casinos, which have begun offering online betting in the U.K., where it’s legal; they have pushed for relaxed regulation elsewhere, including the U.S.
Betable does not yet allow real money gambling in the US but this could soon change as three states have now legalized the activity including New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware, the later of which launched its first gambling site this past Thursday. New Jersey will begin operating similar sites by the end of this month.
Betable’s approach to mobile apps is simple, says Mikael Lefebre, the studio’s director.
“Because we are in such early stages of this real-money wave there’s no need to build large-scale, multimillion-dollar games,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “We can just push out fun, small, real-money games.”
The ultimate goal for Betable is to launch on Facebook but the social media giant has thus far been reluctant to open up to all betting applications.
“It’s a platform we would love to be on,” Griffin tells the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a very big opportunity for our partners and a very big opportunity for Facebook as well.” A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment.
- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
