Pulse
ACQUISITIONS & EXPANSION SPORTCALLER
SportCaller: Bally’s acquisition a crucial development stage
In February, Bally's announced it had acquired free-to-play games provider SportCaller. The deal has seen SportCaller become part of the operator's interactive division, formed after the operator acquired
Bet.Works in November 2020.
From these four, we found Bally's to be the most suitable partner for us on several fronts. Obviously, the financial package was attractive, but also the opportunity to have a ring-side seat for the US market. It was an offer that would have been very difficult to walk away from.
Cillian Barry, Co-Founder and CEO, SportCaller
Cillian Barry, Co-Founder and CEO of SportCaller, remotely sat down with G3 to discuss what the agreement means for SportCaller’s future and the burgeoning US market.
Could you tell us more about Bally's acquisition of SportCaller - how long was the deal in the making and what were the major sticking points in the negotiations?
We entered into a process with Oakvale Capital back in September 2020 looking to raise some funding. By November, we were presented with a list of 15-20 different companies and received four formal letters of interest.
P90 WIRE / PULSE / INSIGHT / REPORTS
We entered into an exclusive arrangement with Bally's in late December and, despite lawyers on both sides only introduced to each other at the beginning of January, the deal was wrapped up by February 5. It was an incredibly fast and efficient process. Bally's were good to their word and goodwill was shown on both sides.
From the outset of founding SportCaller, was being acquired by a major operator always on the cards at some point? Was being acquired part of your long-term planning for SportCaller, or was the offer simply too good to refuse?
Since we started the business in 2010, SportCaller has been through two stages of development. Te first four or five years we were really making it up as we went along. We had a great community of horse racing fans and had our early stage free-to-play games in development, but we were really just trying to find our way in the dark. Towards the end of the first stage, tier one operators began to show an interest in some of the games we were running.
Stage two began around 2016 when we worked with Paddy Power on the Euros, which significantly raised our profile and we brought in
“We entered into an exclusive arrangement with Bally's in late December and, despite lawyers on both sides only
introduced to each other at the beginning of January, the deal was wrapped up by February 5. It was an incredibly fast and efficient process. Bally's were good to their word and goodwill was shown on both sides.”
a couple of key hires that made a huge difference. Following these appointments, we started adding more clients including Kindred and moved beyond the UK into Europe, Australia and the US, which was a big step change.
In 2015, we were self-funded and financially broke making around €20,000 a month. By the end of stage two, we got to a point where we were making €400,000 over the same period with very good profit margins.
We looked at it internally and considered our next steps for stage three, which was to grow 10 times our size over the next three years or so. We wanted to go from five or six million in annual revenue to 50 or 60 million. We had every confidence we could do it, but it would mean creating a completely different business much like the transition from stage one to two.
We recognised we needed to raise some funding support to begin a new stage of accelerated growth - make key hires, sign many more
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