This week: Maincard closes $7M round to "double down" on US market

Maincard closes $7M round to "double down" on US market

The news: Maincard, a white-label platform for launching iGaming brands, has closed a $7M funding round, founder and CEO Valerii Makovetskii said in an email update shared with BettingStartups. He said the round is backed by “some of the top names in iGaming” but did not disclose the investors. The money will go toward the US market, where Maincard is on track to launch at least five brands in Q4.

Zoom in: Maincard says it has crossed $5M in annualized revenue and is on track to reach a $10M run rate by December as the brands it signed earlier gain traction. “Our mission over the next 12 months is to prove that we can outgrow AI labs and deliver a $0 → $10M → $100M revenue trajectory while staying highly profitable,” Makovetskii wrote. Its US brands will run with gamification powered by Smartico.

Why it matters: Maincard’s bigger bet is outside gambling. Under a new motto, “Gamify Everything,” it’s taking its gamification tech into retail, apparel, and jewelry, and has filed provisional patent applications covering gamified e-commerce inventory and mystery packs with physical products, with first pilots coming shortly.

Furnace raises $3.5M to build a reference layer for prediction market contracts

The news: Furnace came out of stealth with $3.5M led by North Island Ventures, with VanEck, Reciprocal Ventures, Reverie, and a group of angels participating. Co-founder and CEO Matthew Siff left Old Mission after almost five years as a quant trader to start the company, and he’s building it with his brother, Andrew Siff, and Gabriel Rizk.

Zoom in: Furnace gives economic exposures persistent identities and maps each venue’s contracts to them, while preserving the differences in rules, terms, and settlement. “Traditional markets have identifiers and reference data that provide that foundation. Prediction markets don’t yet,” Siff wrote on LinkedIn. Adjacent, the prediction market index provider that raised a $2.5M pre-seed this summer, now uses Furnace’s data to identify economically equivalent contracts across venues for its indices and reference rates.

Why it matters: Contracts with similar titles can differ in resolution criteria, settlement sources, and expiration dates, which makes them hard to hold, hedge, or report on side by side. Reciprocal Ventures also backed CRSHMARKET’s $3.5M seed last week, and Furnace is another sign of where the money is going: the plumbing that institutions need before they treat event contracts like any other asset.

Lucky Lady Games’ Volt lets operators create and launch original branded casino games in minutes

The news: Sandra Wong, CEO of Vancouver studio Lucky Lady Games, joined the BettingStartups Podcast to talk about Volt, a platform she says will let operators and studios create and launch original branded games in minutes. Lucky Lady has been bootstrapped so far and is now opening a $3M seed round, which Wong expects to fund 18 to 24 months of runway. Volt won the AWS Game Changer Visionary Award at the Zero Labs accelerator, where Wong went through the ninth cohort alongside First Pitch winner GMonitor.

Zoom in: “People look at Volt as, I think, the game wizard that you can just put in a prompt and create a game, but that is like 10% of what the actual platform is,” Wong said. Before a game is made, Volt looks at the jurisdiction, the operator’s brand, its audience, and the devices they use, then recommends which themes to avoid and what mix belongs in the lobby. An early test is Ghana, where Lucky Lady recently signed a deal with operator Goldbet.

Why it matters: Wong’s pitch is about retention: operators pay heavily to acquire players, then fill their lobbies with the same games everyone else has. “You shouldn’t have to give up 10% of your GGR just to put some differentiation in,” she said. The next 12 months are about closing the seed, going live in Africa, signing tribal deals, and launching the platform.

Catch the entire conversation with Wong on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

• LOW6 acquired Splash Games, a Brighton skill gaming startup, to speed up its Rivalz white-label platform.

• Juice Reel partnered with ProphetX so its users can trade regulated event contracts inside the app.

• Roopicks, a Roobet-linked company, registered with the CFTC as a futures commission merchant.

• Stadium Live Studios is hiring a Creative Strategist Lead to own the creative production process end-to-end across paid ads and organic social for its Stadium Vault app. Toronto. (View job)

• 🆕 Splash Sports is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, AI DevEx to build the infrastructure that lets AI agents do most of its software development. United States - Remote. (View job)

• 🆕 BettingJobs is partnering with a sportsbook operator to appoint a Sportsbook Manager to own the day-to-day performance of a book with a growing focus on Latin America. Remote LATAM. (View job)

• Pioneering the "Studio as a service" model w/ Sandra Wong from Lucky Lady Games

• Automating competitive market intelligence for iGaming operators w/ Gmonitor

• Inside the raise to build "Expedia for sports betting" w/ Gino from BetOpenly & OpenMarkets

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