We Helped Build the First iLottery. Here’s Why We Started Over.

In 1996, a small team in Reykjavik built an internet-based gaming solution for the Icelandic Soccer Pools. It was crude by today’s standards, but it was a first: no state lottery operator anywhere in the world had taken ticket sales online before.

That company was Betware.

Over the next two decades, Betware became the quiet engine behind some of the biggest names in regulated lottery. The company launched Danske Spil’s entire online operation in Denmark, built the digital platform for the Icelandic National Lottery, took BCLC online in Canada, and deployed CIRSA’s lottery systems in Spain. By the early 2000s the team was building sports betting systems, eInstant platforms, and full production environments for state-regulated operators across multiple continents. When Denmark launched its first digital scratch card in 2003, it was our team that took it from concept to live in three months.

I joined Betware in 2001, a year after finishing my computer science degree. Within a year I was implementing the Lotto system for Danske Spil, and from there I moved through just about every role the company had: programmer, project manager, head of development, head of account management, and eventually deputy CEO. In 2012, I relocated to Belgrade to found and run our service office there, a development hub that grew to serve all of Betware’s clients. It was a tight team solving hard problems for demanding operators, and the work was good.

The company worked because it was small enough to move fast and experienced enough to get regulated markets right. Operators trusted Betware because the team sat close to the product, knew the regulatory environment from the inside, and shipped on time. That combination is rarer than it sounds.

What Happens When a Casino Giant Buys a Lottery Company

In 2013, Novomatic AG acquired Betware. The stated goal was to expand into the electronic lottery market, and on paper the fit made sense: Novomatic’s global distribution footprint combined with Betware’s lottery platform and Nordic client relationships.

What actually happened was more complicated.

Novomatic was a casino-first company. Slot machines, VLTs, and gaming halls were the core business. Lottery was a side interest, a strategic hedge rather than a central priority. That meant investment decisions, product roadmaps, and hiring all filtered through the lens of a company whose DNA was fundamentally different from what Betware had built.

The team that had spent fifteen years building lottery-specific technology now found itself inside a conglomerate where lottery was one line item among many. Procurement cycles got longer. Decision-making slowed. The agility that had made Betware valuable to operators started to erode.

This is not an unusual story in the lottery industry. Consolidation has been the dominant pattern for twenty years. Small, specialized suppliers get acquired by larger groups. The acquiring company gets the client contracts and the technology. What it often fails to retain is the operational speed and product focus that made the smaller company attractive in the first place.

The operators on the receiving end of these acquisitions know the pattern well. Your vendor gets acquired. The account team changes. The roadmap shifts to serve the new parent company’s priorities. Response times drift. And you are left with a platform that was built by people who no longer work there, maintained by a team that did not design it.

The Ownership Carousel

What followed the Novomatic acquisition illustrates the pattern clearly. In 2019, Novomatic sold its lottery division to Next Generation Lotteries, a Norwegian-backed venture. NGL’s CEO declared the goal was to “bring power back to the lottery operators.” A year later, Pollard Banknote acquired NGL, folding the old Betware technology and contracts into what became Pollard Digital Solutions.

Three owners in six years. Each transition meant new management, new priorities, and new promises. The underlying technology and client relationships passed through corporate structures like assets in a portfolio, each owner extracting what it needed before passing the remainder along.

For the operators using those systems, every ownership change introduced risk. Would the new owner invest in the platform? Would the people who understood their specific configuration still be around in a year? Would the product roadmap reflect their needs or someone else’s?

These are the questions that hundreds of lottery operators ask themselves regularly, and not just about Betware’s successors. The same dynamic plays out whenever a specialized supplier gets absorbed into a larger entity. The lottery industry’s consolidation wave has produced a handful of very large companies, but it has also left a gap: operators who need modern, maintained, purpose-built technology and cannot get the attention or the pricing they need from vendors focused on billion-dollar contracts.

Starting Over

I founded Bwloto in early 2019. Sverrir Sveinsson, who I had worked alongside at Betware since 2002 and who had risen to Director of Software Engineering at NLS, joined as co-founder and CTO. We brought the Belgrade development team with us, the same people who had been delivering production releases to Norsk Tipping and Danske Spil for over a decade. Johann Sigurdsson, who had spent years as CCO at NLS and then at Next Generation Lotteries winning contracts in Estonia, Norway, and Canada, came on board in 2022 to lead our commercial push.

The decision was not to recreate what Betware had been. It was to build what we believed Betware should have become if it had stayed independent: a cloud-native, SaaS-first lottery platform designed specifically for the operators the industry’s largest vendors have little interest in serving.

The founding thesis was simple. The global lottery market generates over $350 billion annually. The top thirty or forty national lotteries account for a fraction of that. The rest (regional lotteries, charity operators, provincial gaming authorities in Latin America, emerging market operators in Africa and Asia-Pacific, prize draw companies in the Middle East) have the same core needs: a modern digital platform, certified game content, regulatory compliance tools, and a technology partner who actually picks up the phone. What they do not have is a vendor built for them.

The large enterprise suppliers are structurally designed for the tier-one segment. Their sales cycles run twelve to eighteen months. Their implementations cost millions. Their contracts assume a certain scale of operation. For an operator generating $10 million or $50 million a year rather than $500 million, the math does not work. The result is that hundreds of lottery operators worldwide are running on systems from the early 2000s, or cobbling together solutions from multiple vendors, or simply not digitizing at all.

Five Years of Building, Then Showing Up

Bwloto spent its first five years in build mode. Not stealth exactly, but deliberate patience. We invested in platform architecture (microservices, infrastructure as code, cloud-agnostic deployment), game content (25+ certified eInstant titles, including crash games designed from the ground up for regulated lottery environments), and reference clients (Norsk Tipping, Danske Spil, Svenska Spel, Veikkaus, La Française des Jeux (FDJ), Loteries de Catalunya, BCLC, and most recently OLG in Canada).

That build phase produced something unusual in this industry: a company with decades of production experience at state lotteries, ISO 27001 certification, a certified RNG, thirteen consecutive releases to Norsk Tipping with zero critical incidents, and a platform that can deploy a new operator environment in hours rather than months.

The approach was validated externally more than once. When Veikkaus ran a EUR 25 million procurement across six technology categories, forty-two suppliers bid. Bwloto was selected in all three categories it entered, ranking second on quality out of thirteen bidders in platform technology (on a 60% quality, 40% price weighting). Separately, the Lottery Enterprise Innovation Alliance (LEIA), a collaboration between major European lotteries, ranked Bwloto first among technology partners in its selection process. For a company our size, outranking the industry’s largest names in back-to-back evaluations, those results said something.

What This Means for Operators

The Betware story is not unique. It is the story of what happens when specialized lottery technology companies get absorbed into larger corporate structures. The technology survives. The contracts transfer. But the operational focus, the speed, and the institutional knowledge that operators depended on gradually dissolve.

For operators evaluating their next platform partner, the question is not just “what does the technology do?” It is “who built it, who maintains it, and will those people still be there in three years?”

Bwloto exists because a team that spent twenty-five years building lottery technology for other people’s companies decided to build one of our own. The product reflects that experience. But more importantly, the company structure reflects what we learned about what goes wrong when lottery technology sits inside a business that does not prioritize it.

We are employee-owned. We are not a subsidiary, not a division, not a line item inside a conglomerate. Lottery technology is not something we do on the side. It is the only thing we do.

Everything is possible. Then make it fast. That was the motto at Betware in 1996. It still is.

Ivar Unnthorsson is the CEO and co-founder of Bwloto. He has worked in lottery technology since 2001, beginning at Betware, where he helped deploy Denmark’s first eInstant platform and led product delivery for Nordic state lotteries.