Fresh from their pitch at the TechCrunch Europe Geek ‘n Rolla event last week, UK social gambling startup Smarkets has completed a second round fund raising of £145k ($210k), exceeding the first round fund raising total of £100k in May 2008.
Despite what are clearly tough economic conditions, six private angel investors (details undisclosed) have participated this time and the funds will be used for the upcoming Smarkets launch.
In addition, Smarkets has completed its open RESTful API, in what appears to be a first for the betting industry. This is a betting exchange platform built with Erlang, a programming language enabling Smarkets to process thousands of bets per second.
Last week CEO and co-founder Jason Trost pitched Smarkets at Geek’n Rolla, a TechCrunch Europe for startups and investors. Here’s their pitch, recorded by Smarkets themselves:
This isnt too much money to launch a betting service.
It’s also probably not enough money to cover the huge marketing cost in this business….
Is it a competitor of Betfair ? Nevertheless, betting exchange is still a great product.
Betting Exchange is a great product but liquidity is the key. So difficult to go from nowhere to beat the leader….