Betty group CEO: “We want to build the most dominant casino brand of all time” 

Justin Park, the American co-founder and group CEO of online casino Betty, is no stranger to the UK, having clocked up 87 days in the country during 2025. The 37-year-old from New York City, who has a pied-à-terre in London’s well-heeled Cadogan Square, could even be deemed an Anglophile given he’s eaten the quintessentially British chocolate sponge log cake ‘Colin the Caterpillar’ sold by retailer M&S. “Four or five years ago, I was a typical American – very myopic – I didn’t know anything outside of America,” Park admits on a video call from Betty’s Big Apple HQ. “I’m now learning there’s a vast world that’s very different. The UK is very different, and in a good way.”

While London serves as a convenient location to rendezvous with colleagues based out of one of the startup’s offices – Sofia, Bulgaria – the UK is poised to become Betty’s first overseas market since the brand debuted in Ontario, Canada, just over three years ago. A licence application was submitted with Britain’s regulator, the Gambling Commission (GC), in early January. Park, who described the process as “very straightforward and very clear”, says the team is, pending regulatory approval, “shooting for Q2” to go live with its in-house-built product.

Similarly to Betty Canada, which is responsible for the Ontario operations, Betty UK will be a slots-only offering. However, the particularly unusual aspect of the international expansion is that it is underpinned by a ‘decentralised franchise model’. The group CEO characterised it as the “McDonald’s of icasino” in a letter to private investors just over a year when the plan was first unveiled. Local leadership teams on the ground in various markets will have access to Betty IP, an open-source version of the tech stack and seed capital to launch a localised Betty casino. Franchises one day performing M&A and IPOs are even possible, Park wrote on LinkedIn last year.    

Given the differences and idiosyncrasies between international markets – whether it be regulations, payment methods or game preferences – Park felt adopting a franchise model was the best bet for a challenger brand entering new jurisdictions. “The underlying problem is every market is actually very different, and there are aspects you really need to figure out,” he remarks. This setup leaves the Betty Canada team to focus on scaling in Ontario, while the UK launch is a proof-of-concept the approach can be replicated in other regulated markets.

Team building

Sofia-based Zhasmina Draganova, who has been with the business since the outset in 2022, is Betty UK’s chief technology officer and oversees a recently hired technical team. Heading up the UK operation, based out of an office in the Liverpool Street area of London, is Adele Baker, who previously held senior roles at 15 Marketing and Oakvale Capital. She also co-founded Maryland bookmaker Crab Sports. “Adele knows the UK market in a very intimate way,” says Park, “and her investment banking background means she’s very commercial and financially savvy. This is going to be a requirement to win in this new tax environment.”

Indeed, the timing of Betty UK’s arrival arguably couldn’t be worse with remote gaming duty nearly doubling from 21% to 40% from next month. The tax hike has left UK-licensed operators with online casinos trying to figure out how to absorb the added cost. MrQ founder and CEO Savvas Fellas – who is an angel investor in Betty – told EGR in the aftermath of the Autumn Budget that his online casino and bingo business was “hugely in the red” pre-mitigation when accounting for a 40% tax rate.

“In the UK we are now talking about this tax rate,” says Park, underlining how the announcement in November’s Budget has upended strategic planning. “It’s a non-trivial and really hard problem to solve, so you need to have leadership that is focused 100% on solving these highly localised problems.” Ladbrokes and Coral parent Entain has said the percentage of profits it will be paying the UK Exchequer from April is north of 80%, while CEO Stella David has suggested subscale operators are “ill-equipped to ride the storm”.  

So, is Betty’s boss daunted at all by the prospect of entering such a mature and competitive market that’s soon to have one of the highest tax rates in the world? “We really like complexity. If it’s a really hard problem to solve it means we can create true durability.” He adds: “Our view is most, if not all, operators will reduce their investment in the market. If we can track the economics, I think it gives us a path to take massive amounts of market share.”  

Keep it reel

But why enter the UK first and not, say, the US, Brazil or another less crowded European market with regulated igaming? “First and foremost, we wanted to pick a market where we thought our brand would resonate. We think the audience in the UK is going to be similar to Ontario, based on our user interviews. It’s also a very big market, which is attractive. Lastly, innovation has slowed down because operators have spent a lot of time keeping up with the ever-changing regulations, which we also believe are stabilising. We feel an innovative, slots-only casino brand that’s very gamified will do well.”

Serving up purely slots makes sense when you look at the scale of the sector. According to the latest annual report from the GC covering the 12 months to the end of March 2025, online slots generated a record high of £4.2bn in gross gaming yield (GGY), or gross gaming revenue minus bonuses. This compares with £1.6bn a decade ago. Moreover, the segment dominates online casino, accounting for upwards of 80% of the vertical’s GGY. But does not having table games encourage players to go elsewhere to play RNG and live-dealer blackjack and roulette? 

“There are two types of gamblers,” Park responds, after considering his answer for a few seconds. “There’s the active gambler who looks at it as a game of wit, like sports betting, blackjack or poker. Then there’s what we call passive gamblers who are here to press a button and have fun. There are slots players who play other games but, generally speaking, if you can super-serve this user base, you can do well.”

Gaming-only pioneers like Gamesys and tombola proved just that. “We’re going after the slots enthusiast, and women are a big part of that,” he notes. Betty’s leadership has conducted meticulous field research into the UK market and modelled projected customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Ambitions for the expansion are high, particularly with certain incumbents tightening their belts and brands heading for the exit. “We play to be number one – that’s the goal. We want the largest slots market share in the UK, but to get there, we need to delight the customer. We need to make sure the product resonates and is fully compliant. That’s the first step while we have this big and audacious goal in the background.”

As for plans to enter other markets besides the UK, Park says there is “nothing concrete” but Betty now has a “market expansion team”. He explains further: “It’s about weighting markets across 30 or 40 different vectors – regulatory, commercial, everything […] it’s all about repeatability. Can we repeat success?”

Venture Park

Originally from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, Betty is Park’s third business. His first venture was enterprise video content marketing platform Vidaao, which was bought by a larger company in that space, Skyword, in 2014. He then established sports data and affiliate QL Gaming Group, responsible for BetQL and RotoQL, before selling it for $32m in an all-cash deal to sports and news audio broadcaster Entercom in 2020. Next, in 2022, came Betty.

This time the serial founder was joined in his quest by QL Gaming Group COO Jordan Tuch, product designer Annie Zeng and Chavdar Dimitrov, who had been head of platform engineering at supplier Bede Gaming. (Dimitrov became CEO of Betty Canada in 2024.)

Fresh off the success of QL Gaming Group, Park personally led a $1.8m pre-seed funding round to finance the build of a minimum viable product. Angel investors included Avenue H Capital’s Benjie Cherniak, Oakvale Capital’s Sandford Loudon and Sean Hurley, former head of sportsbook at DraftKings. Yet instead of choosing to debut in a state like New Jersey, Pennsylvania or Michigan – all of which have high barriers to entry, like the requirement to partner with land-based gaming properties – the team looked to north of the border. Ontario, Canada’s most-populous province, had launched commercial online sports betting and igaming in April 2022 and didn’t require partnerships. An annual licence fee of C$100,000 and gross gaming revenue taxed at 20% were attractive, too.

After receiving a licence from the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, Betty went live in February 2023, around the same time as a $5m seed round raise led by Karlani Capital. To stand out in the homogenised world of igaming, this offering – built on proprietary tech – would target underserved female players. Billed as being at the intersection of online casino and casual mobile gaming, the team also gamified the UX. “A lot of women play free-to-play games, so a core product thesis was to combine the best-in-class mechanics from social casino or Candy Crush with our offering,” Park explains.

“I think we executed on it very well. The general theme is about creating the experience of progression. The core gameplay is slots, which is very fun in and of itself, but on top of that there is progression where you can increase your loyalty status on our site. Similar to airline loyalty programmes, but I think our implementation is quite elegant.”

Last year, Betty was granted a utility patent for its method of universal progress tracking and reward redemption mechanism in gaming. Meanwhile, fast withdrawals and no wagering requirements on bonuses have helped foster trust with customers. A TrustPilot score of 4.4 from more than 5,500 reviews sits proudly on its homepage. Park says Betty has “15% or 16%” icasino share in Ontario. “The market is always growing, so it’s a moving target, plus it’s tough to know what [Ontario government-owned] OLG’s contribution is to the market.

My understanding is we’re one of the most recognised casino brands now. We’ve done a ton around brand marketing.” Last summer, Betty became an official online casino partner of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors. Then last month, deals were struck with Toronto FC and professional Canadian football team the Toronto Argonauts.  

Digital native

Betty, which has raised $12m in equity to date, the most recent being a $5m pre-Series A round in early 2024 led by single-family office CEAS Investments, rolled out apps last year. The iOS version landed in March, followed by Android in August. Both native apps’ share of total bets steadily grew following their introduction, accounting for a combined 69% of all bets by the end of the year.

“The apps have just different economics. They’re stickier and just monetise better,” Park emphasises. The team also released a new progressive loyalty system in Q3 2025, with players moving up and down a ladder based on their turnover generated in a certain timeframe. This new system drove improved player retention in H2, Betty publicly shared in a Q4 2025 investor update earlier this year.

In what are unusually candid disclosures every quarter for a privately held business, the latest update revealed impressive KPIs, partly because of the investment in product, marketing and the new loyalty system. Net revenue maintained a mostly upward trajectory throughout 2025, rising from $9.4m in January to $27.3m in December. Total revenue for the year amounted to $205.8m, though December’s $27m suggested an annualised run rate of $328m.

Furthermore, active players grew throughout the year, hitting a high of 134,000 in December. Nearly 100,000 actives were added over the course of the prior 12 months. This was partly a byproduct of $63m spent on performance marketing in 2025, while average CAC – factoring in media spend, KYC and welcome bonus – was $330. “The main headline around scale is you need to be able to spend more and more per month on marketing while maintaining efficiency,” Park notes.

What the marketing outlay doesn’t involve is affiliates. Because Betty leans into the knowhow gained with QL Gaming Group, Park says the firm has “never spent a penny” on third-party affiliate traffic. “That superpower is in-house.” As for the bottom line, the challenger operator roughly broke even in 2025, though there were positive EBITDA months. However, the opportunities to deploy more marketing dollars outweighed necessity to stay profitable, management said in the business update.

Having secured $40m in debt to fund user acquisition – $30m of which was from CadaCredit, a private credit platform jointly established by Park – Betty is plotting the next phase of growth. Park states confidently: “Our ambition is to build a global casino brand. We want to build the most dominant casino brand of all time.”

Currently boasting around 400 employees, Betty continues to bolster its leadership ranks. Yotam Yogev arrived from Playtech as group chief product officer in December, while Boris Tejeda, formerly of Entain and Playtech, was recruited as managing director in February. Investing in the proprietary tech stack remains a core focus, too. “We are now building an in-house RGS and in-house games. We quietly built in-house geolocation technology. You cannot reach scale without in-house technology,” the group CEO insists.  

Four years into this journey with Betty, it’s clear from the conversation that Park still gets a buzz out of the unique challenges associated with igaming. “I think it’s a really hard problem to solve,” he ponders. “You’re building a consumer internet business, which is already hard, but overlaying a ton of other stuff like regulatory [compliance]. One of the advantages of being able to spend time in Europe and here in New York is no one has all of the insights to be successful, so you need to draw from lots of different places.”

He concludes: “I could also argue we’re making the world a better place if more money is going into a brand that stands for transparency and treating customers well, rather than going to grey markets or other regulated operators that don’t treat their customers well.” It won’t be long now until UK slots players get to experience first-hand if Betty lives up to these promises.

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