Karolina Pelc’s journey from dealing cards to building and selling BeyondPlay to FanDuel is more than a founder success story. For the gambling industry, it is a timely reminder that some of the strongest digital businesses are still built on casino floor intelligence.
Her Play: Make Your Own Luck, Pelc’s new book, launched on June 9th, brings her founder journey back into focus at a moment when iGaming is wrestling with automation, product differentiation and the next phase of online casino growth. Framed around resilience, reinvention and the unseen years of work before success becomes visible, her book gives the industry a timely reason to revisit what her BeyondPlay story says about product, leadership and lived experience.
Dealing cards to the Big Deal
Karolina Pelc grew up in post-communist Warsaw before moving to London as a teenager. Her first education in gaming came not from a boardroom, product lab or venture capital pitch, but from dealing cards in Leicester Square.
Years later, she launched BeyondPlay, a B2B iGaming technology company focused on player engagement, jackpot systems and multiplayer casino experiences. In 2024, FanDuel acquired the business for an undisclosed sum and integrated it into FanDuel Casino.
This deal mattered because BeyondPlay was not another betting brand chasing attention through marketing spend; it was a product business built around a more difficult question: how can online casino become more social, more flexible and more engaging?
This question is increasingly important. Online casino has spent much of the past decade competing on bonuses, content volume, payment speed and brand visibility. These tools still matter, but they do not solve the deeper product challenge. Digital casino remains, too often, a solitary experience.
BeyondPlay’s proposition sat directly inside this gap. Its technology focused on jackpot management and multiplayer casino formats, allowing players to participate in shared experiences and pooled stakes. For FanDuel, the logic was clear – as US iGaming becomes more competitive, product differentiation matters. Sportsbooks can build engagement through live sport, teams, athletes and media. Online casino has to work harder to create repeat entertainment value.
Learning from the Casino Floor
Pelc’s background helps explain why this product logic carries weight. Casino floors are not simply places where games are dealt, they are pressure rooms. Dealers quickly learn how people behave when money, emotion, ego, superstition and decision-making collide. They see confidence turn into denial. They see risk become impulse. They see the moment when entertainment can tip into stress.
Speaking to GB News, Pelc described casino work as an environment where trust is earned through precision and composure rather than performance.
“You learn very quickly that trust is not built on ideas or charisma. It is built on getting the details right consistently and staying calm under pressure. Casinos strip human behaviour down to its rawest form.”
This observation goes to the heart of modern iGaming product design. In a sector increasingly dominated by automation, data science and AI, the human behavioural layer remains essential. Strong gaming products are not only built by engineers who understand code, they are built by teams that understand why people play, when they stay, when they leave and what makes an experience feel fair, exciting and trustworthy.
For suppliers, this is the commercial lesson. Operators do not buy technology because it sounds clever, they buy it because it solves a problem, improves retention, strengthens engagement or gives them a measurable product edge. Founders who understand the operational and emotional reality of gambling are often better placed to build products that survive beyond the pitch deck.
Understanding the Player
The BeyondPlay story also says something about the kind of talent the industry needs. Gaming has become heavily professionalised, with senior executives moving between listed operators, major suppliers, private equity backed platforms and regulated technology businesses. Yet the sector still benefits from people who have worked close to the player.
That experience is easy to undervalue. It does not always look like a conventional executive CV. It may begin behind a table, in a betting shop, customer support, payments, fraud, compliance or VIP management, but those roles produce knowledge that cannot be replicated by dashboards alone.
Karolina Pelc’s route reflects where value is increasingly being created in iGaming. The strongest returns are not always coming from companies launching another brand into a crowded market. More often, value sits in infrastructure, engagement tools, retention systems, safer gambling technology and product layers that larger operators can acquire and scale.
FanDuel’s acquisition of BeyondPlay fits this pattern. The US market remains heavily sportsbook-led, but online casino is where operators see substantial long-term margin opportunity. In that environment, acquiring specialist engagement technology was a strategic move.
Diversity & Entrepreneurship
There is also a leadership point. The gambling industry talks often about diversity and entrepreneurship, but capital raising and acquisition outcomes are harder measures. Pelc’s move from casino floor experience to venture-backed technology founder and then to operator exit is a strong signal in a sector where senior ownership and funding networks have historically been narrowed. But the story should not be reduced to inspiration. That would make it too soft.
The more difficult point is that Pelc has understood two things that many founders miss. First, the product had to solve a clear operator problem. And second, the company needed a realistic route to scale and acquisition. In the current market, this discipline matters. Capital is more selective, operators are more cost-conscious and investors are less forgiving of businesses that confuse noise with traction.
Founders need more than a clever idea; they need market fit, licensing discipline, credible clients, regulatory awareness and a clear commercial use case. BeyondPlay’s exit shows that these outcomes are still possible, but the bar is higher.
The message for online casino is straightforward – technology alone will not define the next phase of growth. AI, automation and personalisation will change how products are built and delivered, but the winning companies will still be those that understand the player at the centre of the experience. This is where casino floor experience retains value. It teaches that gambling is never purely mathematical; it is behavioural, emotional and social. It is about timing, trust, atmosphere and the ability to manage risk without losing sight of entertainment.
Karolina Pelc’s career is more than a personal success story or a convenient book launch profile; it is a case study in how lived industry experience can become product insight. How product insight can become enterprise value and how enterprise value can attract one of the most powerful operators in global iGaming.
For an industry racing towards automation, this is worth remembering. The future of iGaming may be digital, but the best founders still understand the table.
