In the world of gambling, most people know that casinos make a lot of money. Around $449 billion a year in fact. But where there’s a big business, there are lot of complicated parts. And that, is where lesser known business to business companies jump in. Without all the companies taking up the unglamorous, but often still highly profitable, back end work – the gambling sector wouldn’t operate on the same level it does.
While the big customer facing brands might take all the recognition, it is the b2b service providers who are often the unsung backbone of any sector. This is true in gambling as much as anywhere else. These are three companies who have done very well from themselves, quietly working behind the scenes in the world of online gambling to keep the chips coming down and the odds updated.
Note: game developers were excluded from this list, as they would otherwise dominate it and that wouldn’t be very interesting.
Kambi Group Processes Billions of Sports Bets Per Year
One of the biggest success stories in B2B gambling of recent years, Kambi is now the top dog provider of behind the scenes tech to the multibillion dollar US sports betting sector.
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Just some of the top US and global gambling operators Kambi has backend contracts with include:
- Top US sportsbook DraftKings
- Penn Entertainment and it’s ESPN Bet brand
- Native American tribal gaming operator Mohegan Entertainment
- Leading European operator Kindred Group
Kambi now processes billions of bets annually, across more than 40 sportsbook clients. It also sells its proprietary sports betting market odds calculator to sportsbooks, which it says has improved its clients trading margin by more than 10% in some cases. In a competitive market like sports betting, where any edge is vital to both sportsbooks and bettors this kind of data analysis is invaluable.
In recent years Kambi has also started selling a modified version of its AI-powered Tzeract to financial traders, insurance brokers and other highly lucrative markets.
White Hat Gaming Provides Online Casino Templates
If you’re not familiar with the backend of online casinos, you might not know that there is a huge market for what is essentially “ghost kitchen” style operators.
That is, companies who specialize in creating cookie-cutter template online casinos for other people, who then run them and pay the provider each month for the setup.
European operator White Hat Gaming originally came up on this business model in 2012. However, with the emergence of sports betting and legal online casinos in many US states in 2019, the company took the chance to teach the big US casino giants how to do the online thing.
White Hat has now diversified into specialist backend systems for existing online casino operators, and has done very well out of it. Some of the tech it now provides online casinos includes:
- Massive game aggregation library, giving casinos instant access to 5000 games from more than 100 developers
- It’s Player Account Management system which organizes a digital wallet, account registration and fraud detection into a single product
- It was the first company to develop the technology to integrate online casino accounts across all seven legal online casino states, for which it won several industry awards
Some of these achievements might not sound hugely technical given online casinos have been around for decades. However, the complexities of US online casino regulation from state to state meant some work was required to ensure compliance across various platforms.
GeoComply Provides Crucial Regulatory Tech
Speaking of regulations, one of the key providers of tech needed to fence off gambling operators in the fragmented US market is GeoComply. It has a hugely dominant market share, with all four of the biggest online gambling operators in the market using its services.
It gained this by being the only sports betting geo location expert operator in the world with enough saleability to immediately jump into massive markets very quickly. GeoComply not only processes a check on every bet users make, it also processes people trying to download sportsbook apps from places they aren’t allowed to. Meaning it processes literally tens of billions of pings a year.
Like all three companies on this list, somewhat appropriately, GeoComply is not publicly traded so revenue information is scarce. But experts have valued it at around $1 billion as of 2024.
Side note: GeoComply’s tech (and massive database) also gives cool data points, which it is happy to release in occasional blog posts. Such as exactly how many people cross state lines just to bet, where the most people try to create accounts or make bets from blocked regions, or where in the country gets the most sports bettors congregated in a mile radius.
