Kindred Group Casinos

The Kindred Group is an enormous iGaming company that owns 32Red Limited, Platinum Gaming, Unibet and other casino network companies.
The Kindred Group (kindredgroup.com) is based at Level 2, Valletta Buildings, South Street, Valletta VLT 1103, Malta.

The Kindred Group Casinos 2024

32Red

The most famous of the casinos owned and operated by The Kindred Group is 32Red, which shows how far this loud red brand has come in a relatively short space of time. By rights, the biggest casino brand on the Kindred Group’s network ought to be Unibet, as that’s the casino that the Kindred Group spawned from. Instead, 32Red has eclipsed Unibet’s popularity after joining the network as its star acquisition a few years ago. When 32Red moved to The Kindred Group, it got a full revamp. Leigh Francis, better known to the world as Keith Lemon, was brought in as the brand’s ambassador. 32Red Bingo was closed, with all traffic redirected to Unibet Bingo. 32Red Poker and 32Red Sport survived but no longer have standalone websites. Instead, they were brought into the main 32Red Casino website and became minisites attached to the same band. That means the original 32Red website is now a portal from which players can access sports betting, casino games, Slingo, poker, and live game shows. There’s a downside to all of this, though, and it’s the wagering requirements attached to bonus funds at 32Red. They’re currently set at x50, which is considerably higher than the UK average of x35 and not especially friendly to customers.

Unibet

Unibet is the other “big hitter” under The Kindred Group’s umbrella. If it weren’t for Unibet, The Kindred Group wouldn’t exist. We’ll go into more detail about the connection between the companies and their history further down this page, but in the here and now, Unibet is an iGaming giant. The brand got its start as a telephone betting service in the late 1990s, operating from a single flat in London, England. It embraced the opportunities offered by the new medium of the internet as the 20th century gave way to the 21st, and blossomed online. It’s now a titan of a brand, known for its many sporting sponsorships. In the past, it’s even sponsored entire football leagues. Unibet covers a lot of the same ground that its sister company 32Red does, including sports betting, poker, live casino games and online slots. It’s more of a horse racing specialist than 32Red is, but the range of sports covered at both sites is roughly the same. The biggest difference between the two brands (other than one being red and one being green) is the presence of bingo at Unibet. Bingo is such a core part of the site’s appeal that 32Red Bingo was shut down as part of the deal that brought 32Red to The Kindred Group. Unfortunately, the same high wagering requirements that exist at 32Red sites also exist at Unibet sites.

Bingo.com

Based on everything we just said about 32Red Bingo, it’s a little odd that Bingo.com is still live with The Kindred Group. The rationale for closing 32Red Bingo was that the company wanted less competition in the marketplace for Unibet Bingo. If that’s the case, it’s strange that Bingo.com isn’t also seen as competition. Perhaps part of the reasoning is that while Bingo.com is available to players in the UK, the UK isn’t really the focus of its operations. This is a casino with an international focus – and we haven’t used the word “casino” by accident. While the site might be called Bingo.com, it offers considerably more than just bingo. Like Unibet and 32Red, it’s branched out into other areas and now hosts casino and live casino games to go with its numerous exclusive bingo rooms. There are even a few arcade-style minigames players can pass the time with while they’re waiting for their preferred bingo room to open. However, it’s impossible to escape the feeling that Bingo.com is a little lacklustre. The promotions at the site are weak, and they don’t state their terms and conditions in full anyway. There’s nothing about the site that feels especially exciting. Almost every casino network company in the world would happily pay huge sums of money to own the Bingo.com domain, so it’s a shame that The Kindred Group isn’t doing more with it.

The three casinos listed above are the only Kindred Group casino sites open to players in the UK. However, they’re not the only casinos that The Kindred Group operates. This is a global company. For the sake of completion, The Kindred Group also operates Maria Casino, Casino Huone, Otto Kasino, Vlad Kasino, Kolikkopelit and Storspiller.

About The Kindred Group

Kindred Group History

In almost every way that matters, the history of The Kindred Group is the history of Unibet. It’s a history that begins in 1997, when Anders Strom founded a telephone betting company from an apartment in the Earl’s Court Area of London, England. Strom named his company Unibet and successfully applied for a license from the UK Gambling Commission in 1998. The internet was in its infancy in terms of the average home being connected to the world wide web, but Strom recognised the potential of the new medium. He launched the first incarnation of the Unibet website in 1999, and in the same year, he appointed Pontus Leese as the company. Within two years of opening, Unibet became a PLC and obtained a second iGaming license from the Malta Gaming Authority. Suddenly, Unibet was everywhere.

By 2004, Unibet’s website was available in twelve different languages and had more than three hundred thousand registered players distributed across more than one hundred countries. Unibet wasn’t satisfied with that, though, and so it started buying up smaller betting companies to speed up the expansion process. Unibet bought Stan James – once a familiar name on the British high street – and followed up the purchase by acquiring the Australian betting company Betchoice. As the company had grown beyond a single website, the Unibet name was no longer suitable for the parent company of the Unibet brand. Accordingly, Unibet Plc became The Kindred Group in 2016.

The Kindred Group Era

Even before becoming The Kindred Group, Unibet Plc had been preparing for the moment. Its acquisition strategy sped up exponentially in the years prior to the change of name and brand identity. It bought Bet24, a Danish company, in 2012. In 2014 it acquired Kambi Group Plc. Bingo.com was next on the table and was picked up for £8m in December 2014. Once the change of name had been agreed on and publicly announced, the company set its eyes on bigger targets. 32Red Limited was the target it eventually chose. Buying 32Red was by far The Kindred Group’s largest acquisition deal yet, but it eventually got the deal done for a price that Bloomberg reported as £217m.

Like many iGaming companies – especially those that operate sports betting websites – The Kindred Group has recently turned its attention to the emerging market in the United States of America. The US Supreme Court made sports betting legal across the country in 2018. Since then, most of the biggest sports betting companies in the UK and Europe have been jockeying for position in the new territory. The Kindred Group managed to get ahead of most of the crowd in 2018 by announcing a brand partnership with the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, Georgia. As part of the Hard Rock brand, the company’s online betting services became available in New Jersey. More good news followed in early 2019 when The Kindred Group gained entry to the sports betting market in Pennsylvania by partnering with the Mohegan Sun Pocono Casino.

Today, The Kindred Group employs approximately 2400 people and has offices in the UK, Australia, Malta, Denmark, Belgium, France, Estonia and Sweden, along with licenses to operate in several other territories around the world. It hasn’t published revenue figures since 2017, but the most recent estimates suggest a figure of around £900m per year. The company is publicly listed and trades on the stock exchange in Stockholm, Sweden.

Recent Kindred Group News

The Kindred Group has a dedicated news section on its company website, so staying up to date with what the company has been up to is easy. Most recently, The Kindred Group has proudly announced that it’s been ranked second in the world on the All-Index. For those not in the know, the All-Index is an independently-operated diversity, equity and inclusion monitoring organisation. In assessing The Kindred Group, the survey awarded the company a mark of 79 out of 100. To put the score in perspective, more than forty organisations participated in the survey, and only twelve of them scored more than fifty. The average score was 32.5, and the top score was 85. While rightly feeling proud of the result, the Group is committed to closing pay gaps in the years to come and scoring even higher the next time around.

2022 has also seen The Kindred Group reach new territories. Despite being operational in more than one hundred countries, there are still new frontiers for the group’s casino sites to reach. One of those new frontiers is the Netherlands, which gained access to Unibet for the first time in July after the Group received a gambling license from Dutch authorities. Other Kindred Group websites have been active in the Netherlands in the past, but that was before the country re-thought its stance on regulation for the iGaming industry. The move toward regulation made it the right time for the company to introduce Unibet and its sports betting platform to the nation. There’s no news yet on 32Red, but it would be natural to assume that 32Red will eventually go live in the Netherlands if all goes well with Unibet.

Lastly, The Kindred Group announced in September 2022 that its partnership with the NFL team Philadelphia Eagles will continue through 2025. The announcement confirms the extension of an existing partnership, which sees Unibet serve as the official casino, online gaming and sportsbook partner of the Eagles. As part of the new deal, Unibet will develop a series of Philadephia Eagles-branded mobile casino games for fans of the team, including (but not limited to) blackjack, slots and roulette games featuring the team’s logo and perhaps the likenesses of senior players. Philadelphia is the most important of the American sports betting markets that the Kindred Group has broken into thus far, but it will inevitably expand into more in the future. This isn’t a company that stands still.

All Kindred Group Sites

UK-facing Kindred Group Sites

• 32Red (32red.com)
• Unibet (unibet.com)
• Bingo.com

Non-UK Kindred Group Sites

• Otto Kasino (ottokasino.com)
• Vlad Casino (vladcasino.ro)
• Storspiller (storspiller.com)
• Maria Casino (mariacasino.com)
• Casino Huone (casinohuone.com)
• Kolikkopelit (kolikoppelit.com)