Zeal invests £1m in Free Postcode Lottery

Zeal Investments (ZI) has announced that it has invested £1 million in free to play online lottery platform the Free Postcode Lottery (FPL) in return for a 10% stake in FPL.

The lottery company works by customers visiting the website daily to see if their postcode has been drawn, it saw an average of 300,000 daily active users and is forecast to generate £1m in revenue and £400,000 in EBIT in 2016.

James Oakes, director at Zeal, told iGaming Business : “We are looking to eventually create a global lottery, as there is currently no fully international lottery, the closest at the moment is the Euromillions.

“We have been very transparent with FPL that if it goes well we may want to acquire them outright or increase our investment, but this is not set in stone, we wanted to leave them with their entrepreneurial integrity.”

Oakes emphasised that it was an exciting time for the companies as free to play lotteries offered more flexibility in terms of regulations and came without some of the social stigma attributed to paid lotteries.

Although subject to different regional and country laws, free lotteries don’t need licences for the US, India, China and some EU territories.

Chris Holbrook, founder of FPL, told iGaming Business that the lottery’s success was not gained without difficulties: “The main challenge is that people are sceptical, they don’t realise that the whole internet is built on advertising, they think websites are all free.”

Holbrook said ZI’s investment will help FPL acquire the new users it needs to grow and has set itself the target of growing five-fold in the next 12 months.

ZI was launched by the Zeal Network Group in November 2016 to help prospective lottery start-ups.

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