Video games went multiplayer years ago. Real-money gaming mostly didn’t. Backgammon, poker, and bingo once brought players together, but slots and most casino games today are a player against the house. “Times changed, the games didn’t,” Sparley Interactive co-founder Elad Dvir said on the BettingStartups Podcast.
Sparley Interactive is a game studio making fast, multiplayer games for iGaming operators. A round of online bingo runs three and a half to five minutes. A Sparley game lasts 15 to 45 seconds, with loud music and a younger, Gen Z audience in mind. Co-founder Daniel Flesch compared the first title to a crash game crossed with a game of chicken. Players push their score as high as they dare before it drops to zero, while watching a live leaderboard of everyone else in the room. “If I win, everybody else loses,” he said.
Dvir and Flesch know the bingo player well. The pair spent about 15 years together running the B2B bingo network at 888, and moved over when Broadway Gaming bought that business. They left a couple of years later, started a consulting firm, and launched the game studio about a year ago. The name comes from their dogs, Spot and Harley.
They built the first game to replace online bingo. Then an investor told them it wasn’t bingo at all, just a numbers game. The founders now pitch lottery, bingo, and soft casino operators that want something different on the site.
Building games turned out to be the easy part. Aggregators liked the titles but couldn’t support the multiplayer tech, so Sparley built its own remote gaming server (RGS). Preparing a UK supplier license application meant writing policies and appointing compliance officers. Getting operators to commit was its own hurdle. “It’s always the middle of next year,” Dvir said of operator roadmaps. “Doesn’t matter even what month we’re on.”
Three games are now market-ready. The first is integrated with an operator in Rwanda and expected to go live within two to four weeks. All of them run on shared liquidity across countries, in multiple currencies and in four languages—English, French, Swahili, and Kinyarwanda. Dvir said about five or six UK operators are waiting on the games once the license comes through. Flesch named Ontario, Alberta, Finland, and Sweden as other regulated targets, alongside early talks with US state lotteries and sweepstakes operators. A fourth game is starting development now, and Dvir expects a new release about every six weeks after that.
The founders raised £220K from two UK angels about six months ago, the first half of their pre-seed round. They’re now looking for the remaining £210K while talking to VCs and a family office about a larger check. When their lead investor offered more, they took half. “If we’re going to lose money here, we better lose as little as possible,” Dvir said. “Definitely, if it’s not our money.”
The team is the two founders and two developers, and neither takes a salary yet. For 2027, Flesch wants Sparley’s games live in a handful of countries with a handful of operators. Dvir wants the larger round that makes more regulated markets possible.
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