From humble beginnings, the online casino industry has grown into a market worth more than $130 billion annually, and it has enabled a new generation of entrepreneurs to build fortunes that would have seemed impossible when the first gambling sites launched in the mid-1990s. The smartphone revolution, the gradual expansion of regulated markets across Europe, North America, and Australasia, and the rise of cryptocurrency-native platforms have all created conditions for extraordinary wealth creation. Below is an updated and expanded look at the entrepreneurs who shaped the industry — and the newer faces rewriting what iGaming success looks like in 2026.
LeoVegas is one of the most decorated online casino brands in Europe. Founded by Robin Ramm-Ericson and Gustaf Hagman in 2011 and launched the following year, the company was built around a mobile-first philosophy at a time when most competitors were still designing primarily for desktop. The timing was perfect. Hagman and Ramm-Ericson caught the wave of mass smartphone adoption across Scandinavia and quickly extended their reach across regulated European markets.
The company expanded aggressively through acquisition, purchasing Royal Panda in 2017 and later securing the first Swedish gambling licence when the local market opened in 2018. After years of growth and multiple Global Gaming Awards, the founders achieved what many would consider the ideal exit: in 2022, MGM Resorts International acquired LeoVegas in a deal worth approximately $607 million. Hagman stayed on as CEO for a further three years following the sale before stepping down in June 2025, marking the end of a 14-year run at the helm. He had guided the company from five games at launch to a library of thousands.
Calvin Ayre founded Bodog in 2000 and, when the surge in online gambling accelerated through the early 2000s, became one of the most prominent and controversial figures in the industry. His networking ability and willingness to push into grey-market territories helped Bodog scale at a time when regulatory frameworks were far less defined than they are today.
Ayre embraced cryptocurrency well before it became a standard conversation in iGaming, using blockchain-based products to diversify his business interests and maintain relevance as the industry evolved. He built a luxury resort in Antigua and Barbuda, which became something of a destination for the global gambling set. His brands continue to operate through licensing arrangements in various markets around the world.
Isai Scheinberg’s story remains one of the most compelling in online gambling history. A Canadian software engineer and IBM alumnus, Scheinberg built PokerStars from a small operation into the dominant online poker platform in the world. Explosive growth from 2006 onwards turned the company into a global giant, though a turbulent regulatory period followed when US authorities took action against major online poker sites in 2011, resulting in a landmark legal settlement and a $765 million payment.
Scheinberg weathered the storm, and in 2014 sold his stake in PokerStars to Amaya Gaming in a deal that earned him a substantial fortune. He has largely stepped back from the industry since. His son Mark Scheinberg, who was also heavily involved in the business, has gone on to pursue interests in property and hospitality.
The PokerStars brand, now owned by Flutter Entertainment — one of the world’s largest publicly listed gambling companies — remains the biggest poker platform on the internet, a lasting legacy of what the Scheinberg family built from scratch.
Betway has grown into one of the most visible sports betting brands in the world under the leadership of Anthony Werkman. The company’s sponsorship strategy has been particularly aggressive, with major partnerships across football, cricket, esports, and boxing helping to build brand recognition in dozens of markets. In 2016 the company made headlines for what was then a record jackpot payout of more than $17.8 million on a single spin.
Werkman oversaw continued expansion into new verticals and geographies, with Betway now operating under a Super Group structure that encompasses multiple brands. The company has navigated significant licensing changes as markets across Europe and North America have tightened their regulatory frameworks, and has positioned itself as a compliance-focused operator in regulated jurisdictions. Betway remains one of the more recognisable names in global iGaming.
No updated list of online gambling entrepreneurs would be complete without Denise Coates, who has arguably done more to define the shape of modern online betting than anyone else. Coates founded bet365 in 2000 after purchasing the domain name and launching the site in 2001, funded by a £15 million loan secured against her family’s chain of betting shops. Those shops were later sold to Coral for £40 million, repaying the loan and freeing the business to grow without external pressure.
The company Coates built from a portakabin in Stoke-on-Trent is now one of the world’s largest online gambling platforms, processing more than £65 billion in bets annually and operating in dozens of regulated markets. She holds approximately 58% of the company alongside her brother and co-CEO John Coates and their father Peter, who serves as chairman. The company has remained entirely private throughout, despite persistent speculation about a potential IPO or sale that analysts have valued in the range of $10 to $12 billion.
Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani represent the new face of the online casino industry. The pair first met online as teenagers while playing RuneScape, and their early experiments building casino mechanics inside that game’s virtual economy laid the conceptual foundation for what became a multi-billion-dollar company. They launched Stake in 2017, building it around cryptocurrency payments at a time when few mainstream operators were paying attention to crypto-native users.
Stake grew at a remarkable pace, particularly through the pandemic years when livestreamed gambling content exploded in popularity. The platform reported gross gaming revenue of $4.7 billion in 2024, up roughly 80% in just two years. The company expanded its sponsorship footprint significantly, most notably rebranding the Sauber Formula One team as Stake F1 in 2024. Canadian rapper Drake serves as a paid brand ambassador, reportedly receiving $100 million annually. In 2022 Craven and Tehrani also launched Kick, a live streaming platform built partly around gambling content that has grown into a significant competitor to Twitch.
Craven, born in 1995, became one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. The transition Stake has made toward traditional fiat payments — with around 70% of bets now placed in standard currencies rather than crypto — reflects a deliberate move toward the regulated mainstream that is likely to define the company’s next phase of growth.
If you have ever played a live dealer game online, you have almost certainly used a product built by Evolution. Founded in 2006 in Sweden by Jens von Bahr and Fredrik Österberg, the company set out to bring the atmosphere of a real casino table into the home through high-quality video streaming and professional dealers. The concept was simple. The execution was exceptional. When the first major operator dedicated a full website tab to live casino powered by Evolution’s technology, traffic on that site increased by 400% in a single year.
The company went public on the Nasdaq First North exchange in 2015, valued at around $340 million. By the early 2020s it had grown into one of the most valuable companies in the entire online gambling ecosystem, listed on the main Nasdaq Stockholm exchange and regularly cited as one of the best-performing stocks in the Nordic region over the prior decade. Evolution expanded its product range aggressively through acquisition, absorbing Ezugi, NetEnt, Big Time Gaming, and Nolimit City at various points, making it the dominant supplier of live casino and premium slots content to operators worldwide.
Today the company employs thousands of studio staff across Latvia, Malta, Georgia, and other locations, running live tables around the clock for operators in dozens of regulated markets. Von Bahr serves as chairman of the board and both founders retain significant shareholdings. Without the live casino category they built from scratch, the online casino industry would look very different today.
Where the Industry Goes From Here
The global online gambling market entering 2026 is a very different landscape from the one that Calvin Ayre and Isai Scheinberg navigated in the early 2000s. Regulation has matured substantially across Europe and is expanding in North America, Latin America, and parts of Asia. The industry’s biggest players are increasingly publicly listed, institutionally owned, and subject to meaningful compliance requirements around player protection, advertising, and anti-money-laundering.
Yet the conditions that create new fortunes remain intact. Mobile gaming now accounts for roughly 70% of all online gambling revenue globally. Crypto-native platforms like Stake have proven there is a large and underserved audience willing to engage with gambling products through new financial infrastructure. Live casino technology continues to improve. And large, high-population markets including California, Texas, and Brazil are either unregulated or newly opening, representing enormous potential for whoever establishes a strong position first.
The entrepreneurs who recognised and acted on those opportunities early have built some of the most remarkable wealth stories in the modern tech era. The next generation of names on a list like this one is being written right now.
