Charles Gillespie, CEO and co-founder of Gambling.com, is a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill who grew up in Charlotte, where it has its largest concentration of staff.
That’s pretty much it when it comes to conventionality for what is ostensibly a North Carolina company.
GAMBLING.COM Timeline
Gillespie lives in Monaco, while Gambling.com is domiciled in Jersey, an island in the English Channel that offers tax advantages and different regulatory oversight than U.S.-domiciled companies. Its other key office is in Dublin, Ireland.
Gillespie and Kevin McCrystle founded the company after both attended Providence Day School in Charlotte and UNC Chapel Hill. They started the company in 2006 to provide sports content to East Asian soccer fans, but it posted limited revenue in its first decade.
Since 2016, however, it has reported rapid and profitable growth. It is benefiting from surging interest in sports betting and online casinos. It is also serving the nascent prediction markets, which involve trading on the outcomes of future events.
Still, four-and-a-half years after its initial public offering in July 2021 at $8.50, shares are trading at record lows. The mid-January price was about $5, slightly above its $4.60 low point in November. Previously, shares had mostly topped the IPO price, and exceeded $14 briefly in 2021, 2023 and early last year.
The company declined requests for comment. Executives had “limited availability,” a spokesman said.
But Gillespie periodically uses the X social media service to share his thoughts. On Nov. 25, he said his family office had acquired an additional 1% of the company’s shares, which he said gives him an 11% stake, valued at more than $18 million. The company doesn’t report executive compensation, which isn’t required under Jersey law.
“I believe the current valuation is completely disconnected from reality and I am delighted to pick up shares at these levels,” he wrote on X. Other company senior managers were buying shares, he said, adding that he’d provide an update. That hasn’t happened as of mid-January.
Despite its name, Gambling.com isn’t an online casino or betting service such as DraftKings, BetMGM and the other businesses that are riding the explosion of gaming in the U.S.
Rather, Gambling.com operates more than 50 websites that provide marketing, promotion and referrals for other businesses that offer various gambling services. “It’s a digital publisher running several gaming information websites,” financial analyst Bashar Issa wrote in a Seeking Alpha review of the company in December.
The bulk of revenue, including 63% in the first three quarters of 2025, came from revenue sharing, in which referrals from website users provide a fee to the company.
Its staff of dozens of writers analyzes and recommends online betting sites. When a new customer uses its portal to sign up for a site, Gambling.com gets paid, either with a flat payment for the referral or a portion of the revenue produced by the affiliation.
In 2025, about a quarter of Gambling.com revenue derived from selling subscriptions to sports data, such as fantasy sports statistics. That was triple the percentage of the previous year. More than 50 million people in the U.S. play fantasy sports, with NFL the dominant attraction, according to the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association.
The balance of the company’s revenue, about 12%, came from website advertising.
SEARCH SCUFFLE
Mounting global interest in betting and several acquisitions has helped Gambling.com sizzle. Revenue was minimal in 2016, but grew to $18.6 million in 2018, $76.5 million in 2022 and $127 million in 2024. While results from the final quarter haven’t been reported, revenue is on track to top $150 million over the past year.
The company also makes money. Cash flow grew significantly, from $4.4 million in 2018 to an average of $24 million between 2022-24, according to Joseph Parrish, another Seeking Alpha analyst. The company reported a cumulative $63 million in net profit between 2021-24.
It helped that the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 reduced federal oversight of betting, enabling states to permit wagers as a means of raising tax revenue. North Carolina entered the fray in 2024, and more than $7 billion was bet last year, according to state regulators.
Over the past year, however, Gambling.com has lost nearly two-thirds of its stock market value. A key factor is that a changing online search market is making it harder for the company to attract customers. Google, the king of search, periodically changes its algorithms and more consumers are relying on artificial intelligence commentary, rather than looking at traditional websites. Gambling.com is among many businesses reliant on Google that are facing similar challenges.
Speaking to analysts in November, Gillispie said, “As has been the case since July, Google search algorithms continue to generously favor low-quality spam content in the gaming space, in particular outside the US.” He expects Google to make a change, he said, noting, “I’m not responsible for clearing the spam out of the search results. That’s, obviously, the search engines’ job.”
Bank of America analyst Shaun Kelley cited search issues as among three factors that are likely to cause volatility in gambling-related company shares during 2026. The other two were the industry’s moves in the fast-growing prediction markets and changes in state tax policy for online betting.
DEALS AND CASINOS
Gambling.com has made some acquisitions, aided by backing from Princeton, New Jersey-based Edison Partners, which invested $15.5 million in 2019. Other institutional backers include New York-based AWM Investment and Millennium Management, which owned 4.3% and 3.5% stakes, respectively, as of Sept. 30.
In 2022, Gambling.com paid $27.5 million to acquire Madison, Wisconsin-based Roto Wire. It has provided news and information for fantasy sports fans since 1997, “when the Internet was just taking flight,” Roto Wire says on its website. “We’ve stayed ahead of imitators,” noting it has developed partnerships with high-profile partners such as ESPN, Yahoo! Sports, Fox Sports, CBS Sports, DraftKings and NBA.com.
The company made its biggest acquisition in December 2024 by buying New York-based Odds Holdings, which provides odds data to sportsbooks and bettors. The deal called for an upfront payment of $80 million, plus an additional $80 million contingent on the company’s performance. The deal boosted revenue by about 30%.
In a Dec. 30 X post, Gillespie says Gambling.com “bet on a winning horse with OddsJam and OpticOdds [websites.] The businesses are flying and continue to exceed expectations.” He called it “virtually certain” that Odds Holdings will create enough value so that the $160 million payout will occur. Meanwhile, the deal raised Gambling.com’s debt to $75 million on Sept. 30, versus $9 million at the start of the year.
Another potential winning play for Gambling.com is the increasing number of states sanctioning U.S. online casinos, which enable one to join a blackjack table from home rather than dropping by a gaming site. Only seven states permitted online casinos as of December, and North Carolina isn’t one of them, according to CBS Sports.com.
But online casino revenue gained 27% in the U.S. last year, nearly quadrupling expectations of Truist analyst Barry Jonas. He and other experts expect that growth to continue as cash-strapped states look for new revenue sources.
Online casinos are “much more lucrative from both a commercial perspective and a state tax revenue perspective,” Gillespie told the Charlotte Business Journal in 2022.
In December, Macquarie analyst Chad Beyon gave Gambling.com stock an outperform rating partly because of “the fast-growing US online gaming market, which is poised for continued legalization.”
Other analysts expect Gambling.com to overcome turmoil in search optimization.
The company “is seeing continued momentum in its sports data services, which management sees as the new core of its business, boosted by prediction markets,” Jonas wrote in a report last year.
Those markets are an emerging field in which Gambling.com makes money by selling data to serve an industry now led by Polymarket and Kalshi, both New York-based companies. Nearly a dozen states have taken action against prediction market platforms over the past year, contending the contracts — “Will Trump acquire Greenland by 2027,” for example — qualify as gambling and are subject to state regulation. The platforms say that they have federal protection from state enforcement.
“We expect the prediction market ecosystem to become significantly larger given the national addressable market and some advantages over state-regulated sports betting,” Gillespie told analysts in November. Best of all, it isn’t a substitute for sports betting, he noted.
Beginner’s Luck
North Carolinians love sports betting. That’s clear as the state nears the second anniversary of legalization in March.
Bettors put up more than $7 billion in the legal online sportsbooks last year. Since inception, the total bets have topped $12 billion. Paid wagers topped $650 million in each of the last four months of the year, according to the N.C. State Lottery Commission.
The state collected $132 million in tax revenue from operators in the 2025 calendar year, based on an 18% tax on gross wagering. That’s the money bet minus paid winnings and before expenses, fees and taxes.
The tax revenue is directed to several sources: gambling addiction programs run by state health officials; an events fund that helps recruit sports, music and other tourism events; youth sports programs; and UNC System athletic departments, excluding NC State and UNC Chapel Hill. If there’s money left over, half of it is sent to the state’s general fund.
North Carolina has seven licensed betting operators after Underdog Sports stopped accepting new wagers in December. Officials don’t disclose who has the most customers or volume.
The lottery commission is led by a nine-member board chaired by Raleigh lawyer Ripley Rand, a former U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina. The group’s CEO is Mark Michalko, a former executive at International Game Technology. ■
David Mildenberg is editor of Business North Carolina. Reach him at dmildenberg@businessnc.com.