Maincard sells the tech to launch an online casino in minutes, and it often tries to talk would-be operators out of it. “Most of the time what we do when we see the person might not be ready, we try to talk them out of it instead of just taking their money and building the brand for them and leaving them hanging,” founder and CEO Valerii Makovetskii said on the BettingStartups Podcast.
Maincard calls itself the Shopify for iGaming. Its platform lets anyone stand up a casino, sportsbook, lottery, prediction market, or card-rip site, and Makovetskii said brands now go live in seven and a half minutes, where even a white-label launch used to take six to eight months. Maincard runs the back office, and the partner’s job is bringing in players. “If you have access to the players, then that’s 80% of the success,” he said.
The platform grew out of Maincard’s fantasy sports game, the last in a string of pivots that ran through electronics, virtual conferences, and MMA streaming. Walking SBC and ICE, Makovetskii saw how hard it was for small teams to break into iGaming, and his CTO and co-founder suggested opening up their own stack as templates.
Maincard works on revenue share, “so if you don’t make money, we don’t make money,” which is why the warnings come first. Makovetskii walks prospects through the math. A $100 deposit loses $12 to payment fees, a withdrawal costs another $10, and a $200 qualified lead might deposit $50 and leave. He cited a statistic that 90% of casinos close within their first 12 months. Since Maincard launched in January, he said, three of its 30 brands have closed. For brands it sees heading toward profit, Maincard will cover a few losing months.
Maincard entered the US in June with sweepstakes, then added prediction markets and card rips. Makovetskii sees talent—athletes, musicians, and YouTubers reached through their agencies—as its biggest source of new brands next year. Partners also kept telling Maincard they couldn’t open a bank account, so it built MainCard.com, banking for high-risk businesses, which offers operators free crypto-to-fiat conversion. Virtual debit cards for players are next.
Maincard closed a $7M round earlier this month. Makovetskii said it was twice oversubscribed and named Jeff Sagansky, who took DraftKings and Skillz public, operator Derek Bloom, and Alan Vine among the investors. It follows a $2.7M pre-seed, and he said he put about $3M of his own money in before raising a dollar.
Card rips also sparked the company’s “Gamify Everything” push. Maincard has filed patent applications for mechanics that put physical products into digital packs, and plans to launch a fashion brand built on pack openings at the end of December. The 12-month targets are 60 active brands and $100M in revenue across them. His advice to founders is the same he gives operators. “Don’t start your business with an investment deck,” he said. “Start with a proof of concept.”
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