Nigerian gaming mogul Mr Eazi's betting partner pawaTech made $115 million profit in 2025

The company that licenses the betPawa sports betting brand to Nigerian singer Mr Eazi's Choplife Gaming grew revenue 36% to $245.7 million last year, a figure that shows the scale of the betting business the Afrobeats star has built across Africa.

pawaTech Group Ltd, the UK-registered owner of the betPawa technology, lifted operating profit to $158.2 million in 2025 from $135.6 million a year earlier. It paid $120.1 million in dividends to shareholders, up from $19 million in 2024. The company was founded by Danish entrepreneur Kresten Buch, who launched betPawa in Uganda in 2014 and is pawaTech's executive chairman.

Choplife, which Mr Eazi chairs, now operates in at least 12 African countries. It runs betPawa in eight of the brand's 17 markets, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Benin, Liberia and Mali, and its own Choplife and Chopwin brands in Botswana, Côte d'Ivoire, The Gambia and Sierra Leone. pawaTech earns royalties, platform fees and support fees from those operators, all tied to the profits they make.

Mr Eazi, 35, whose real name is Oluwatosin Ajibade, said in a UK radio interview this month that he is already a billionaire in naira and Ghanaian cedis. A billion cedis is worth about $85.6 million at the Bank of Ghana's interbank rate of 11.68 cedis per dollar, while a billion naira is about $751,000 at ₦1,331.69 per dollar. Asked about a fortune in dollars, he said: "US dollars, you know, soon come. I'm not really looking for that, that's not the target."

What the accounts show

pawaTech said growth came from existing markets and from new products, including casino games. Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization rose to $196 million from $146.7 million. Profit after tax edged up to $115.3 million from $111.1 million, held back by a tax charge that climbed to $43.9 million from $24.2 million.

Administrative expenses almost doubled to $101 million. Technology and IT spending reached $27.5 million, and foreign exchange losses jumped to $23.1 million from $4.3 million. The group's operators collect money in Kenyan shillings, Ugandan shillings, naira, Zambian kwacha, cedis, Tanzanian shillings, Central African CFA francs and Congolese francs, while most of pawaTech's costs are paid in euros and sterling.

The group employed an average of 322 people, up from 237. Its core development team works in Tallinn, Estonia, where a subsidiary holds the platform's intellectual property. pawaTech also lends to its operators to help with working capital. Those loans stood at $17.1 million at the end of 2025, and the group wrote down $6.17 million of them during the year.

A further interim dividend of $62 million for 2026 was paid after the year ended. The group closed 2025 with $75.2 million in cash and net assets of $125.2 million.

Mr Eazi has been an investor in betPawa since 2017. Buch founded pawaTech and runs it as executive chairman, though no single individual, Buch included, has effective control of the group. In February, pawaTech issued new shares at £212.15 each, a price that values the whole company at about £374 million ($494 million).

The group is also shifting its base. Two subsidiaries were set up in Dubai in January 2026, and some Rwandan units are being wound down. The accounts also disclose that HM Revenue and Customs is in talks with the group about certain past UK tax filings, and that the outcome cannot yet be estimated.

From campus parties to phones

Mr Eazi was born in Port Harcourt, in Nigeria's oil-producing south, and moved to Ghana in 2008 to study mechanical engineering at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. On campus he set up Swagger Entertainment, a party and promotions outfit that booked artists for student events. "I would do parties and concerts every two weeks," he said in a 2019 interview. He quit promotion in 2014 after an act failed to turn up for the biggest party he had tried to stage.

After returning to Nigeria, he took a job in oil and gas in Port Harcourt. "After I came back from Ghana, I got a job in oil and gas in Port Harcourt that paid about six thousand dollars per month," he said on a Lagos radio show in 2017. He left it, completed a master's degree and went into phones, saying that "with all that qualification I started selling phones in computer village," a reference to the sprawling Lagos electronics market. "Everyone thought something was wrong with me," he said.

The phone trade became a telecoms business that, by his account, had 14 outlets and 20 staff. In 2014 he started Phonetrader.ng, an online marketplace for second-hand phones that won a place in 440NG, a Lagos incubator backed by Buch's venture firm 88mph and by L5Lab. He has called that period "one of the most influential periods of my life."

Music was running alongside. He had started recording at university, and by 2016 songs such as "Skin Tight" had built him a following across West Africa. In July 2016 he walked away from the phone business to sing full time. "Instead of mobile phones it's music," he said in 2018. "I'm selling happiness and good vibes. It's a better product and it's easier to sell."

The Buch connection

Buch had been in online betting long before Africa. In 1997 he and a childhood friend went into internet sports betting in Scandinavia, partnering with Australia's Centrebet, and in 2007 he sold a sports data platform to Genius Sports. A two-week growth course at Stanford in 2009 turned his attention to Africa. He founded 88mph in 2011 and backed 45 start-ups in Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria between 2010 and 2014, few of which worked. "Entrepreneurship can't be taught in school. You need to pay your school fees in the real world," he said in 2025.

betPawa grew out of that period. In 2014, 88mph took a minority stake in mBet, a Ugandan sports betting company, and betPawa launched in Uganda that year. It reached Kenya in 2015, Nigeria and Zambia in 2017, and Ghana and Tanzania in 2018. "When we started in 2014, desktop was irrelevant, and we said, 'We're going straight to mobile,'" Buch said. "We built everything from scratch, specifically for this market." betPawa players deposit and withdraw only through mobile money.

Juri Sidorenko, a programmer who helped Buch build the sports data platform, is now pawaTech's chief executive and joined the pawaTech Group board in June 2025. "Sometimes, we celebrate removing features if they bring more negative than positive impact," Sidorenko said of the product.

The payments arm was spun out in 2020 as pawaPay, with Buch as chairman. Mr Eazi's Zagadat Capital joined its $9 million seed round in 2021, and he joined its board. pawaPay passed 3 billion mobile money transactions in June 2026 and has secured a payment service provider licence from the Central Bank of Kenya. pawaTech's accounts show it shares significant shareholders with pawaPay, whose subsidiary processed payments that pawaTech recharged to operators at cost, worth $14.2 million in 2025.

Mr Eazi's ties to betPawa run through his music business as well. betPawa sponsored emPawa Africa, his artist incubator, in 2018, including the production of 100 music videos by emerging African artists. He appeared in betPawa television adverts across several countries in 2021 and became its official brand ambassador in 2022.

Choplife's spread

Choplife Gaming ran betPawa in five countries, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Rwanda and Benin, when it opened its first wholly owned brand, Choplife.ci, in Côte d'Ivoire in April 2024. "I'm excited to venture into our sixth market with the launch of Choplife.ci," Mr Eazi said at the time.

In January 2025, Choplife bought the betPawa rights for Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, under a four-year agreement with pawaTech built on an upfront licence fee, and extended the same terms to its five existing betPawa markets. "We have successfully worked with Choplife Gaming in other markets and are excited about their willingness to co-invest into the Nigerian market with us," Buch said. Mr Eazi called it "an exciting moment to bring the operational excellence we have perfected in five African countries to Nigeria."

Expansion has continued since. betPawa went live in Liberia under Choplife's licence in January 2026, and PMU Mali, the state gaming regulator, approved its launch in Mali in May. Choplife's own casino and instant games brand, Chopwin, operates in Botswana, Côte d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Sierra Leone and Uganda, and the company has announced plans to take it to Namibia, subject to approval from the Namibia Gambling Board.

In September 2025, Mr Eazi said on X that Choplife had paid 17 billion Rwandan francs, or about $11.7 million at the time, in taxes in Rwanda since 2022. Rwanda now taxes gross gambling revenue at 40%, up from 13%.

Gaming now sits inside a wider Choplife group that includes emPawa Africa, the Detty Rave concert series, the 1v1 Africa sports business and Choplife Soundsystem, a group he formed with Kenyan DJ Edu.

His investments run through Zagadat Capital, which has backed pawaPay and the Lagos lifestyle start-up Eden Life. In May 2026, Zagadat Capital GH bought 47.5 million shares, or 17.31%, of Intravenous Infusions PLC, a Ghanaian maker of intravenous fluids listed on the Ghana Alternative Exchange, and said it was not seeking control.

He now wants a listing at home. "It will be a pleasure to list a technology company on the NGX," Mr Eazi said in August, referring to the Nigerian Exchange, adding that the group was "just at the beginning of that process." He said Choplife already has more than 21 engineers building its technology in Nigeria.