Ed Craven Net Worth and How He Met Bijan Tehrani

Ed Craven’s net worth has become one of the most searched terms in online gaming, and for good reason. The Melbourne entrepreneur turned a teenage fascination with video games and digital currencies into a multibillion-dollar empire built around Stake.com and Kick.

Ed Craven Net Worth and Relationship With Bijan Tehrani

Alongside longtime friend and collaborator Bijan Tehrani, Craven redefined not only how people bet and stream but how they connect online. By fusing crypto gambling with influencer culture and mainstream entertainment, he built not one but two of the most recognizable online brands in the world. 

In less than a decade, the pair have generated billions in yearly wagers and propelled Craven into the elite list of young Australian billionaires. It’s a fascinating story of how an everyday gamer from a small suburb of Melbourne built a global powerhouse, how his early experiments with online staking led him to his partner, Tehrani, and how that alliance has evolved and changed over the years.

Ed Craven Fortune in 2025

Ed Craven 2025 wealth is just shy of $3 billion USD. These estimates are based on data from Forbes, Bloomberg, and various Australian business filings. Ed Craven’s billionaire status places him firmly alongside other tech and gaming billionaires who have turned digital innovation into generational wealth. 

Still, much of his net worth is tied to his equity in Stake.com and Kick, so it is highly dependent on these companies continuing their global growth. The Stake and Kicks accounts are complicated, as are the ones involving his other large holding, EasyGo, but more than $340 million was disbursed by Stake last year as a distribution from partnership income, so it’s also possible that he has a salary in the hundreds of millions range annually. 

In addition, Ed Craven’s real estate portfolio includes the Toorak “ghost mansion” in Melbourne for $88 million.

Ed Craven’s Early Life and Background

Born in 1995, Ed Craven was fascinated with both gaming and technology. But unlike most adolescents, he wasn’t just playing Runescape and Counter-Strike; he was already thinking about the systems behind them, how they tied into the marketplace, and how virtual economies might be leveraged for real-world value.

Already by his mid-teens, the future Stake.com founder was beginning to experiment with small online business ventures and dabble with Bitcoin, long before it became a household name. He displayed an innate talent for spotting digital trends, which led him to a like-minded community of early crypto enthusiasts who shared his obsession with all things tech.

Like many other famous founders, he quickly decided college wasn’t for him. He founded Easygo Solutions, a software company specializing in gaming and casino platforms. From the beginning, the company was a success and became an integral part of several new online gaming brands launched by Craven.

It was here, in this hodgepodge of interconnected online ventures, that he first met Bijan Tehrani, another young Australian as brilliant and brash as himself. And that friendship was based on a shared belief held by both Tehrani and Ed Craven; crypto gambling could be merged with the nascent online communities beginning to form, into a powerhouse that appealed to tens of thousands of young men just like themselves.

How the Kick Streaming Platform Founders Met

Long before they dreamed up Stake or Kick, Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani were just two overly ambitious teenagers who casually knew each other through gaming forums and chat servers. They soon began an informal partnership centered on their shared love of risk, insatiable curiosity, and, of course, code.

Their first experiments involved mimicking the way virtual assets were staked in the games they loved, but tying that into a peer-to-peer system that was more based around small-stakes wagering. Their Prime Dice game would become quite popular, and while it didn’t really lead to a huge breakout, the pair learned a lot about the tech and psychological aspects of digital betting and how the community enhanced that.

In their early twenties, they would revisit the idea, but this time with a burgeoning Bitcoin community ripe for their product. The name of their new company, Stake, was a play on those early days of attempting to exploit the game mechanic. 

How Billionaire Ed Craven Built Stake.com

In 2017, Stake.com was launched, with its headquarters in Curacao under the name Medium Rare N.V., another play on words with the company name. In reality, the company was primarily run out of Australia through a loophole in the law that allowed it to conduct day-to-day operations as long as it didn’t offer gambling services to Australians. 

As usual, their timing was perfect. Crypto was just becoming mainstream, and many young men had both crypto wallets and a large appetite for risk. 

Stake would fill that gap perfectly. They offered far quicker deposits and provably fair games. In just a few short years, they were one of the largest crypto gambling hubs in the world. 

It wasn’t just impeccable timing, though. The company made some smart strategic partnerships early on that quickly drove growth. Chief among them is partnering with Pragmatic Play to create a live dealer studio, which not only enhances their credibility but also sets a new standard for the crypto casino experience. They also secured high-profile sponsorships one after the other, including those with Premier League clubs, UFC fighters, and even Formula One teams. 

Then, the cherry on top: a partnership with Drake, one of the most recognized celebrities in the world, whose streams on the platform would begin to bridge the gap between gambling and entertainment. While the collaboration would draw millions of new users, it would definitely also have its ups and downs, as the occasional feud between the superstar and Stake would be front-page news around the world. Perhaps there really is no such thing as bad publicity?

In any case, in 2024, Stake’s gross gaming revenue was $4.7 billion, up 80% from just two years prior. Clearly, something was working.

Expansion into Kick

After conquering the world of crypto casinos, Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani set their eyes on what at first might have seemed a different frontier entirely: streaming. In late 2022, they launched Kick, a bold new live streaming platform designed to compete with Twitch by offering better revenue share and far fewer rules on content. 

Craven and Kick streaming co-founder Tehrani envisioned a platform where creators could thrive without all the rigid rules that had driven many from traditional streaming giants like YouTube. What is less clear is whether they envisioned the significant impact it would have on live gambling streaming in particular. 

Like Stake, Kick was meant to disrupt the current model. It chose to do this by rewarding streamers with as much as 95% of the revenue generated. That’s the kind of headline that gets people’s attention, and it led the company to an almost overnight success as content creators from around the world rushed to sign up.

Kick also pioneered integrated gambling and streaming experiences and now hosts a variety of online casinos, not just Stake. It continues to innovate new ways to blur the lines between entertainment, content creation, and wagering. 

Ed Craven’s Business Philosophy and Strategy

While Ed Craven’s timing has been impeccable, his success ultimately hinges on striking a balance between risk and structure. He built his empire by being willing to pivot before the competition does, anticipating what’s coming, and pushing all in when he is sure of the opportunity. This quick adaptation and a disciplined sense of innovation have served him extremely well.

He also continually reinvests profits back into the business and has a keen sense of the need for advertising, both as a word-of-mouth driver of business and as a way of reassuring his customer base that his products and business are reputable and accepted.

Together with Kick streaming co-founder Tehrani, he’s cultivated a culture of trust in all his businesses, a quality that has helped them retain control of those companies through some harrowing ups and downs. 

Ed Craven Crypto Gambling Challenges and Controversies

As one might imagine, a casino that uses a hard-to-trace digital currency not always understood by regulators is bound to draw some additional oversight. They have also frequently offered the game in jurisdictions where it is not licensed or, perhaps more relevantly, taxed, which has often drawn the ire of other regulators, especially in the US.

In 2025, several states, including Illinois and California, either issued cease-and-desist letters or actually filed suit against the crypto casino billionaires for operating illegally. The company also left the UK market after a highly controversial advertising campaign involving adult entertainment star Bonnie Blue. The company stated that it wasn’t involved in the ads and had decided to focus on jurisdictions with clearer regulations. 

The company also had a very public falling out with Drake this year. The singer, who reportedly had as much as a $100 million deal with the online casino, left in a roar of rage, tweeting and name-calling before permanently deleting his rather public account.  

The company has acknowledged past mistakes regarding KYC and AML shortcomings, as well as some responsible gaming lapses in various locations around the world. However, it insists that it has worked hard to remedy these issues and has implemented much tighter responsible gaming tools to protect its customers and the company’s reputation. 

Future Outlook for the Stake.com Founders

It’s extremely unlikely that a pair as driven as Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani are likely to kick back and rest on their laurels. Neither man is quite yet thirty, and they have decades left to continue building their legacy. 

Insiders expect Stake to pursue additional licenses in key jurisdictions, including LATAM and North America, while Kick looks to focus on esports and live event broadcasts in the near term. Additionally, look for features such as seamless cross-platform wallets and deeper Web3 integrations as companies continue to explore ways to enhance user stickiness and time spent on the app.

Conclusion

From teenage gamer to billionaire disruptor, Ed Craven’s story is equal parts timing, tenacity, and talent. He built not one, but two pillars of modern iGaming, changing how millions bet, watch, and connect online.

While this journey is just getting started, one thing seems certain: daring and discipline can take you a long, long way.

FAQs

References

• Ed Craven (Forbes)