Smarkets, the UK-based peer-to-peer betting exchange, has raised a fresh $2.3 million round of funding led by Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture, along with existing backer Passion Capital. This brings the London startup’s total funding to $3.3m.
The addition capital will be used to “accelerate technical and product development”, specifically through staffing up in engineering and other developer positions to help deliver a roadmap that includes things like new markets for punters to trade on, a dedicated mobile app, and price history and trading charts.
Meanwhile, Randeep Wilkhu, Senior Investment Manager at T-Venture, and Robert Dighero, Angel Investor and Partner at Passion Capital, will join the Smarkets board.
Smarkets, which was founded by Jason Trost in 2008 but didn’t publicly launch until early 2010, is aiming to disrupt the lucrative and highly competitive betting industry with what it claims is superior technology and a better deal for punters through lower commissions on each bet — just 2%, which is an “industry-low”, says the company.
Competing most directly with incumbent Betfair, Smarkets enables peer-to-peer betting in which users set their own odds and bet against one another, mainly on various sports. It’s currently seeing £30m in transactions traded per month.
Smarkets is a prediction market website that makes punting on your favourite events simple and social. Instead of betting against a bookie, with Smarkets you bet against other members. Founded in 2008 by Jason Trost (CEO) and Hunter Morris (CTO), Smarkets’ multi-national team works out of offices in London. Smarkets is backed by a group of private investors.
T-Venture is the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom, an integrated telecommunications company with roughly 180MM customers and more than $75m net revenue in 2011 – more than half of that from international operations. T-Venture was founded in 1997 to advise and look after young, innovative enterprises which show potential economical and technological synergies with the business units of Deutsche Telekom. T-Venture has two evergreen funds: Products & Services Fund, Process & Infrastructure Fund. The headquarters are in Bonn...
Passion Capital is a partnership of entrepreneurs and operators applying our experiences to helping founders and early-stage teams build great digital media/technology companies. We are Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge and Robert Dighero. We have been personally involved in the largest European technology exits of the past decade, including the biggest exits of the year for 4 of the past 10 years by market value (Ricardo.de acquired by QXL, Skype purchased by Ebay, Last.fm acquired by CBS, and QXL/Tradus acquired by...
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