Who owns Stake? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Stake.com is one of the largest online casinos and sportsbooks in the world, yet almost none of it is public. It has no listed shares, no venture backers on the cap table, and no regulator in a major Western market publishing its accounts. It runs on cryptocurrency, operates from an offshore license, and is owned outright by the two men who built it.

That structure is the whole story. Stake took a business that would normally answer to gaming commissions, public shareholders, and payment processors, and kept it private, crypto-native, and offshore. The founders captured almost all of the upside because they never sold much of it. It also means the public record on ownership is thinner than for a regulated operator like a listed sportsbook.

This article lays out who owns Stake, how the holding structure works, and why the private, offshore setup shapes everything from its marketing to its regulatory exposure. Where facts are confirmed, they are labeled as such. Where figures are reported or estimated, that is flagged too.

Stake.com launched in 2017 as a crypto casino and sportsbook. It grew out of an earlier product, Primedice, a Bitcoin dice game the founders had run since 2013. Stake broadened that idea into a full casino, original games, and a sportsbook, all funded and cashed out in cryptocurrency.

The company is based around Easygo Entertainment, a Melbourne, Australia company founded in 2016 that houses the technology, game studio, and staff. The consumer-facing operator, Medium Rare N.V., holds the Curacao license under which Stake.com serves most of its international markets.

Stake reported gross gaming revenue of roughly $4.7 billion for 2024, a figure it disclosed publicly, up sharply from prior years. That scale puts it in the same conversation as large listed gambling groups, even though Stake generates it without access to the United States, the United Kingdom, or much of Europe. The revenue comes almost entirely from casino and sports betting margins, denominated in crypto.

Stake is privately held. There is no stock ticker, no public filing of its accounts, and no outside institutional shareholder of record. The business is controlled by its two founders through Easygo Entertainment Pty Ltd, the Australian holding entity, with Medium Rare N.V. operating the licensed casino. This is a closed ownership structure, which is the opposite of how regulated Western operators such as DraftKings and FanDuel are held.

Public reporting consistently describes Stake as split between its two founders, and several accounts put the ownership at roughly 50/50. Other reporting on the Australian holding company has described Tehrani as the majority ultimate beneficial owner. The precise equity split is not publicly documented, because the company files no cap table and discloses no shareholder register in a major market. What is confirmed is that no traditional venture capital firm holds a stake, and control sits with the two founders.

Stake did not raise conventional venture funding. It was bootstrapped from the founders' earlier crypto gambling product, Primedice, and grown from operating cash flow. There are no priced rounds, no lead investors, and no reported outside valuations tied to financing. The table below reflects that.

Because Stake took no outside equity, it has no venture or private equity backers to name. The closest thing to an external stakeholder is a marketing and sponsorship partner rather than an owner. Rapper Drake signed a high-profile promotional deal with Stake, but he is not reported to hold equity in the company. His arrangement is an endorsement contract, not an ownership stake.

There are no IPO signals. Stake has given no public indication of pursuing a listing, and its offshore, crypto-native model would be difficult to take public in a major regulated market. The founders have instead reinvested in adjacent ventures they own, including the streaming platform Kick.

Ed Craven is the co-founder most associated with Stake publicly. An Australian entrepreneur, he has been profiled by Forbes as one of the youngest self-made billionaires, with an estimated fortune of around $2.2 billion, though estimates vary. He is the public face of the company's expansion into streaming and sports sponsorship.

Bijan Tehrani is the other co-founder, an American coder who built the early technical product with Craven. The two met as teenagers playing an online game and began collaborating on crypto gambling projects before launching Stake. Tehrani keeps a much lower public profile than Craven but is an equal or majority principal in the business, depending on the source.

Together the founders also own Kick, a live-streaming platform they launched in 2022 to compete with Twitch, and they backed a Formula 1 title sponsorship that ran as Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber before Audi took over the team for 2026. Because Stake is private and founder-run, there is no independent public board of directors in the way a listed company has. Governance sits with the founders and the Easygo corporate structure.

Stake.com operates internationally under a Curacao gaming license held by Medium Rare N.V. A Curacao license is far lighter-touch than the regimes governing regulated Western operators, and it lets Stake serve many markets without a local license. That offshore posture is central to the ownership story: keeping the operator in Curacao and the parent in Australia is what allows a closed, founder-owned model to run at global scale. It also means Stake sits outside the oversight that applies to a US-licensed book like BetMGM.

Stake.com is restricted or unavailable in a long list of countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, France, and others. It withdrew from the UK market in 2025. In the United States it does not offer real-money crypto gambling at all, and instead runs a separate social and sweepstakes-style product, Stake.us, under different rules. This patchwork of access is a direct consequence of the offshore model. The company reaches players in markets where it holds no local license, which regulators in banned jurisdictions treat as a problem.

On or about September 4, 2023, Stake.com lost roughly $41 million in cryptocurrency in a security breach. The FBI publicly attributed the theft to the Lazarus Group, cyber actors linked to North Korea, and reporting indicated the attackers exploited a compromised private key to a hot wallet rather than a flaw in a smart contract. Stake continued operating and covered the loss, but the incident highlighted a risk that is structural to a crypto-native casino: custody of large crypto balances makes the operator a target, and there is no deposit insurance behind it.

Stake and its founders have faced legal claims tied to the early history of the business. An associate connected to the founders' earlier Primedice venture has pursued a large lawsuit alleging he was wrongfully excluded from the ownership that became Stake, with reported damages figures in the hundreds of millions. The specifics remain contested and are matters of ongoing or reported litigation rather than settled fact. Disputes of this kind are more likely in a closely held private company where equity was never formalized through outside investors.

The private, founder-owned structure is why Stake keeps almost all of its own economics. A regulated, listed operator shares profit with public shareholders and answers to a board. Stake answers to two people. The roughly $4.7 billion in 2024 gross gaming revenue flows into a closed structure, which is how two founders built billion-dollar fortunes from a business that took no venture capital.

That same structure is what enables the offshore model. Because there are no outside investors demanding a US listing or a UK license, the founders can keep operating from Curacao and Australia and accept being banned in major regulated markets. A company beholden to institutional shareholders would face pressure to enter those markets and submit to their oversight. Stake trades that access for control and margin, and its owners are the ones who get to make that trade.

For users, private offshore ownership cuts both ways. It gives Stake the freedom to run crypto-native products and pay out in crypto, which is the whole appeal. It also means there is no local regulator standing behind the player if something goes wrong, no public accounts to inspect, and, as the 2023 hack showed, no insurance on the crypto held on the platform. The prediction-market operators such as Polymarket and Kalshi face their own version of this regulatory question, but Stake's crypto-casino model is the most exposed.

Ownership also explains the marketing. Because the founders control the whole business, they can pour cash into a Drake endorsement, a Formula 1 sponsorship, and their own streaming platform without justifying it to a board. Those bets are how a brand that cannot advertise in most Western markets built global recognition. They are founder decisions, funded by founder-owned cash flow.

Stake is owned by its two founders, Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, through the Australian parent company Easygo Entertainment. The casino operator of record is Medium Rare N.V., which holds the Curacao license. No venture capital firm or public shareholder owns a stake.

Ed Craven is the co-founder most publicly associated with running Stake and its parent, Easygo Entertainment. Bijan Tehrani is the co-founder who built the early technical product. The company is founder-run rather than led by an outside professional executive team, and it does not publish a conventional corporate leadership chart.

No. Stake is privately held and has no listed shares. It filed no IPO, took no institutional funding, and publishes no audited accounts. This makes it very different from listed sportsbooks such as DraftKings, whose ownership is public.

No. Drake signed a large promotional and endorsement deal with Stake, reported to be worth around $100 million a year, but he is not reported to hold any equity in the company. His relationship is a marketing contract, not ownership. Reports in late 2025 suggested the partnership may have ended.

Stake reported gross gaming revenue of roughly $4.7 billion for 2024, a figure the company disclosed and that reporting described as up sharply from prior years. That revenue comes from casino and sports betting margins across international markets, denominated in cryptocurrency, and excludes the United States and United Kingdom.

The parent company, Easygo Entertainment, is based in Melbourne, Australia. The consumer casino, Stake.com, operates under a Curacao gaming license held by Medium Rare N.V. That offshore license is what lets Stake serve many international markets while remaining banned or restricted in the US, UK, Australia, and several European countries.