Online technology firm NYX Gaming has completed the acquisition of rival sports betting platform provider OpenBet.
The Toronto-listed company issued a market update on Monday, in which it confirmed that the £270 million co-funded deal has already been finalized, more than a month after it first announced.
Last April 4, NYX announced that it is acquiring 100 percent of OpenBet’s assets from private equity firm Vitruvian Partners. The online technology company received an £80 million contribution from UK betting operator William Hill and an additional £20 million from Sky Betting & Gaming.
The acquisition will also have NYX repay OpenBet’s outstanding £95 million corporate debt.
In exchange, NYX Gaming will get more than 2,000 desktop and mobile game titles on the OpenBet platform and a combined workforce of 1,100 staff based in 14 countries across Europe, North America, Asia, New Zealand and Australia.
NYX Gaming CEO Matt Davey said acquiring OpenBet marked the “next phase of the company’s growth,” enabling the gambling technology firm to service “exciting player-driven solutions across all verticals and channels.”
“We now turn our focus to planning and executing the strategy to leverage the collective strengths and benefits of scale that the combined business brings to our customers and shareholders,” Davey said.
The successful acquisition of OpenBet is another bit of good news for NYX Gaming, which saw its revenue nearly double in 2015, thanks to a year packed with new client deals and acquisitions.
Revenue for 2015 was up 92 percent to $52.3 million and gross profits gained 86 percent to $44.8 million, but NYX also recorded a net loss of $8.4 million—worse than the $7 million loss in 2014—partly due to the troubled Ongame online poker product.
Davey said in an earlier interview that the company hopes to convince Amaya—who sold Ongame in 2014—to switch its BetStars sports betting product to the OpenBet platform. The executive admitted that there were no guarantees that Amaya will abandon its existing sports platform but with OpenBet powering a host of the UK market’s biggest bookies, “you would have to imagine [Amaya] would consider our product favorably.”
