No room at the inn for Stake.com crypto billionaires, as staff numbers soar above 300
Cryptocurrency gambling billionaires Edward Craven and Bijan Tehrani have grown their staff numbers so quickly that they can no longer fit them all into a Melbourne pub for Friday lunch.
Australia’s youngest billionaire Edward Craven likes to shout his workforce for lunch regularly at Melbourne’s oldest building, Mitre Tavern.
But last week, the owners of the 200-year-old pub delivered a regretful message to the cryptocurrency and gambling baron: “we can’t accommodate you anymore”.
The Queen Anne-style establishment nestled in a lane off the western end of Collins Street is surrounded by skyscrapers and a watering hole for equally towering figures. The problem with Craven was when he took his staff for lunch, he needed to book out the entire pub – and even then space had become too tight.
This month, his Stake.com empire hired its 300th employee at its Melbourne office. The company – which he founded with Bijan Tehrani in late 2016 – leased more floor space at its office around the corner in Collins Street as it has grown exponentially from being a team of two to hundreds.
“We are extremely proud of our growth as an Australian based tech company,” Tehrani said.
“We started with no funding as kids in our basements and now have more than 300 staff in our Melbourne office. We love living in Melbourne and are grateful for the opportunity to work with such a diverse and talented group of people.”
Craven and Tehrani have embarked on a flurry of deals – including partnering with small ASX-listed firm Racing and Sport Technology last month to use its technology to launch a horse racing betting service – to propel further growth.
But its most flamboyant move to date has been buying the naming rights for Sauber Formula One team during the new year period, following the departure of Alfa Romeo. The foray into F1 – which followed a sponsorship deal with English soccer club Everton – aimed to ensure the Stake empire is catapulted further into the mainstream, alongside Craven and Tehrani’s successful new global streaming business Kick.
Before the Mitre Tavern lunch last Friday, Bijan and Tehrani were in the UK for the unveiling of the Stake F1 Team car. The company’s name is stamped onto the chassis, with F1 rules requiring team owners to build the car part or its engine.
Already, Stake is one of the world’s biggest crypto casinos, taking on average $US400m each day. It claims to have taken more than 200 billion bets on its platform since launching seven years ago – including more than 100 million on its sports book.
It has become so big by 2022 that its owners claim it accounted for about 7 per cent of total Bitcoin transactions around the world daily. “People have been trying to find the killer application for cryptocurrency,” Tehrani said at the time. “Well, it’s gambling.”
While its head office remains in Melbourne, it is domiciled in Curacao, off the coast of Venezuela in the Dutch Caribbean. Using cryptocurrency to gamble in online casinos remains banned in Australia.
But Mr Craven and Mr Tehrani are moving to establish a legal gambling presence locally. Last July, the company applied for a bookmaking licence in the Northern Territory. If it’s successful, it would mean it would become a mainstream operator competing with established online corporate bookmakers such as Sportsbet, PointsBet and Entain’s Ladbrokes and Neds, as well as the ASX-listed Tabcorp.
Mr Craven and Mr Tehrani have also registered a company name, Stake Gaming, with the Australian Securities & Investments Commission – the first time the duo has made a move to use their Stake brand locally.
But their meteoric rise onto rich lists hasn’t been without controversy. They recently avoided a $580m claim against their company by a former business partner after a US court threw out the claim due to a lack of jurisdiction. It has also legal petition lodged against it in Curacao from a group of customers.
While Stake has emerged as one of the world’s biggest gambling companies, most of its customers are in so-called “grey markets” where regulation of online cryptocurrency gambling is not present or unclear.
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