FanDuel

• 1. Introduction

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  FanDuel was founded on the 21st of July 2009 in Edinburgh, Scotland, by five people who had just abandoned a news prediction website called Hubdub. Nigel Eccles, Lesley Eccles, Tom Griffiths, Rob Jones, and Chris Stafford walked away from news forecasting with $1.2 million from Pentech Ventures and Scottish Enterprise and a bet that daily fantasy sports could become a real business. What followed was a decade of escalating funding rounds, a near-merger blocked by federal regulators, a Supreme Court ruling that reshaped American gambling law, and a foreign acquisition that ended in lawsuits in two countries. How did a Scottish startup built on a pivot become one of the largest gambling companies in the United States? And what did its founders think when they found out what it was worth?

• 2. Fantasy Football and Venture Fuel

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  In 2010, FanDuel ran its first FanDuel Fantasy Football Championship. Ten players qualified by winning leagues across the NFL season; first place earned $25,000 and the total prize pool reached $40,000. The format was simple: pay to play, prove your skill, collect real money.

  By January 2013, the company had closed an $11 million Series C round. September 2014 brought $70 million in Series D funding. Then in July 2015 a $275 million Series E pushed FanDuel's valuation above $1 billion. That same stretch saw three acquisitions: sports analytics firm NumberFire, then mobile app developer Kotikan in July 2015 (Kotikan had built FanDuel's mobile app, so absorbing the team was a consolidation as much as an acquisition), and in September 2015, the esports-focused daily fantasy service AlphaDraft. In May 2015, FanDuel had also hired 38 of the 42 employees laid off by Zynga 365 Sports, bringing in a ready-made team with gaming experience. The company was scaling in every direction at once.

• 3. The Insider Advantage Problem

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  In October 2015, a DraftKings employee inadvertently released internal data before the third week of NFL games, then won $350,000 on FanDuel's platform. DraftKings argued its employee could not have used proprietary information to select a FanDuel lineup. The argument satisfied few observers.

  FanDuel responded by noting that DraftKings employees had collectively won at most 0.3% of the $2 billion in prizes FanDuel had distributed. Both companies then banned employees from entering paid contests on rival sites. A separate analysis published around the same time found that 91% of player profits at DraftKings and FanDuel combined went to just 1.3% of the player base. That figure recast the business: daily fantasy looked less like a competitive game open to anyone and more like a market where a small professional class reliably extracted money from casual entrants.

  Regulatory pressure built. In September 2017, both FanDuel and DraftKings each paid $1.3 million to settle with the Massachusetts Attorney General's office over allegations of unfair and deceptive practices dating to before 2016. The twin settlements closed the legal chapter on the scandal but confirmed that the companies had operated in genuinely contested territory.

• 4. A Merger That Died in Court

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  On the 18th of November 2016, FanDuel and DraftKings announced plans to merge. Together they would have served more than five million users and, by the Federal Trade Commission's own estimate, controlled roughly 90% of the daily fantasy sports market.

  The FTC announced on the 19th of June 2017 that it would seek a preliminary injunction to block the deal, calling the projected market concentration a monopoly position. A federal judge issued a temporary stop order. Both companies abandoned the merger rather than fight the injunction to conclusion.

  November 2017 saw Nigel Eccles, the founding CEO, leave the company. CFO Matt King moved into the top role. Co-founder Tom Griffiths departed shortly after; Nik Bonaddio, who had arrived through the NumberFire acquisition, replaced him as Head of Product. The leadership team that had built the company from Edinburgh was largely gone before FanDuel's biggest transformation arrived.

• 5. The Irish Acquisition and Its Lawsuits

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  A 2018 Supreme Court ruling repealed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, which had effectively made sports betting illegal in nearly every US state. Irish bookmaker Paddy Power Betfair, now known as Flutter Entertainment, announced in May 2018 that it intended to acquire FanDuel.

  The deal terms had Paddy Power Betfair contributing $158 million and folding in its existing US assets, including horse racing cable networks TVG Network and TVG2. Paddy Power Betfair took a 61% controlling stake with options to increase to 80% and then 100% over time. The acquisition closed on the 11th of July 2018, creating FanDuel Group.

  The FanDuel board valued the company's stake at $465 million in the merger. Founders considered that figure far too low. Lesley Eccles, who had served as FanDuel's head of marketing, filed a $120 million lawsuit in Scottish court. On the 25th of February 2020, more than 100 former employees, founders, and early investors filed a separate New York suit alleging breach of fiduciary duty, claiming the board had undervalued FanDuel to enrich themselves. The dispute meant that FanDuel's transformation into a major gambling company arrived alongside litigation in two jurisdictions from the people who had built it.

• 6. Sportsbook Growth and Revenue Scale

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  A few days after the merger closed in July 2018, FanDuel opened its first retail sportsbook at the Meadowlands Racetrack in New Jersey. March 2019 brought a second location at Valley Forge Casino Resort in Pennsylvania. Online wagering expanded state by state through Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, and New York.

  In December 2020, Flutter Entertainment increased its ownership stake in FanDuel Group to 95% through a $4.1 billion cash-and-stock transaction. That same year, FanDuel entered a multi-year deal to become the official sports betting partner of the PGA Tour, placing FanDuel odds on the tour's digital properties; the agreement was later extended through 2027 and expanded to include official odds provider status during tournament broadcasts. In 2021, FanDuel Casino launched in selected states. By January 2026, the company ran an online sportsbook in 23 US states plus Ontario and Puerto Rico, retail sportsbooks in 15 states, and daily fantasy contests in more than 40 states. Flutter's US segment, the FanDuel brand, reported $5,798 million in total revenue for the year ended the 31st of December 2024: $4,013 million from sportsbook, $1,524 million from iGaming, and $261 million from other streams.

• 7. Networks, Partners, and New Markets

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  In August 2022, FanDuel relaunched TVG Network as FanDuel TV. The channel kept live horse racing coverage at its center but broadened its scope to include mainstream sports from a betting angle. Then on the 16th of October 2024, Diamond Sports Group disclosed in a bankruptcy court filing that its Bally Sports regional sports networks would rebrand as FanDuel Sports Network. The agreement gave FanDuel an option to take a 5% equity stake in Diamond upon exit from Chapter 11 protection; Diamond subsequently renamed itself Main Street Sports Group.

  In November 2018, FanDuel had announced a multi-year agreement with the National Hockey League covering both sports betting and daily fantasy, alongside a same-day sponsorship deal with the New Jersey Devils that included in-arena placement and brand integration across team platforms. In 2023, the PGA Tour partnership added a market access deal to bring FanDuel's sportsbook to North Carolina.

  In November 2025, FanDuel announced a prediction market product aimed at users in states where conventional sports betting remains illegal. The product also responds to competitive pressure from new startup betting exchanges entering the US market, opening a path into jurisdictions that FanDuel's sportsbook licenses cannot yet reach.