Nexus International founder Gurhan Kiziloz amasses $1.7bn fortune without external capital

Gurhan Kiziloz has built a $1.7bn personal fortune by scaling Nexus International to institutional size without outside capital, retaining full ownership in an industry defined by dilution.

Gurhan Kiziloz, founder of gaming group Nexus International, has accumulated a personal fortune of $1.7bn without raising external capital, a rare feat in an industry where scale typically requires institutional backing.

The wealth, derived from his stake in Nexus International, holdings in blockchain project BlockDAG, and the Spartans.com casino brand, positions Kiziloz among the most significant self-made figures in global gaming. Unlike peers who built comparable fortunes through venture capital rounds, private equity partnerships, or public listings, Kiziloz has retained full ownership and control throughout Nexus’s growth.

Nexus International closed 2025 with $1.2bn revenue, tripling its full-year 2024 performance of $400m. The growth trajectory, an $800m increase in twelve months, ranks among the fastest in the online gaming sector. The original target for 2025 was $1.45bn revenue. Nexus missed it by $250m, with profit dipping 7 per cent by year-end, reflecting aggressive reinvestment into expansion rather than margin optimization.

The group comprises three platforms: Spartans.com, a crypto-native casino that has emerged as the primary revenue driver; Megaposta, a Brazil-focused sportsbook that established Nexus’s regulatory credentials when the country formalised gambling legislation in early 2025; and Lanistar, which operates at the intersection of fintech and gaming across European and Latin American markets.

Spartans.com received the largest share of capital deployment during 2025. Kiziloz invested $200m of internal funds into the platform, financing infrastructure expansion, licensing applications across multiple jurisdictions, and marketing commitments, including a sponsorship of Argentina’s national football team.

The platform now features more than 5,900 games, processes both cryptocurrency and fiat payments, and offers instant withdrawals, a capability that addresses user friction legacy operators have been slower to resolve. User experience is localised by market rather than standardised globally, a detail that matters in a sector where deposit delays and withdrawal queues directly impact retention.

Spartans.com’s most visible recent initiative is a giveaway for the Mansory Jesko Spartans Edition, a one-of-one hypercar custom-built by German tuning house Mansory using a Koenigsegg Jesko as the base. The giveaway, which launched January 15 2026, will not be repeated or extended.

The self-funded model distinguishes Nexus from publicly traded competitors such as Flutter Entertainment and Entain, who must balance growth investments against quarterly earnings expectations. Kiziloz faces no such constraint. Strategic decisions, including the $200m Spartans.com deployment, are made without board approval or investor consultation. The trade-off is that every expansion must be financed through operating cash flow, limiting the ability to pursue multiple large-scale initiatives simultaneously.

Kiziloz’s approach to leadership has drawn attention beyond financial results. Earlier this year, he removed BlockDAG’s chief executive and senior leadership team, a move that unsettled observers accustomed to consensus-oriented governance in the blockchain sector. The decision reflected his view that management layers had begun to slow execution rather than accelerate it.

BlockDAG, a Layer-1 blockchain built on directed acyclic graph architecture, represents Kiziloz’s expansion into cryptocurrency infrastructure. The project aims to combine high transaction throughput with security properties associated with proof-of-work systems. Whether the technology delivers on these claims remains to be demonstrated at scale, but the vertical integration thesis is clear: Kiziloz seeks to control both consumer-facing gaming platforms and the settlement infrastructure beneath them.

The online casino market provides a substantial runway for continued growth. Industry forecasts project global online gambling reaching $150-170bn by 2030, with online casino specifically growing at approximately 12 per cent annually. The sector is expected to roughly double in nominal terms over the decade, with Europe remaining the anchor market and Latin America, North America, and parts of Asia providing upside.

In this context, Kiziloz’s prioritization of scale over short-term margins aligns with the competitive logic of a market where distribution and user relationships compound over time. Operators who establish infrastructure during the growth phase hold structural advantages when the market eventually matures.

Nexus has indicated intentions to pursue an initial public offering by 2027, contingent on reaching a $5bn revenue threshold. No listing venue has been disclosed. The gap between current performance and stated target remains substantial, but the trajectory suggests the benchmark is not implausible.

At $1.7bn net worth and $1.2bn revenue at Nexus International, Kiziloz represents an anomaly: a founder operating at institutional scale without institutional backing. Whether the model sustains through further growth will determine if it represents a replicable strategy or an exceptional circumstance.

For now, the results speak for themselves. The fortune was built. The capital remained internal. The control never left.