Who Owns Kick? The Company Behind Kick.com

Kick was founded in 2022 by Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, two Australian entrepreneurs best known as the co-founders of Stake.com, one of the world's largest crypto casinos. Before Kick, the pair built Easygo Entertainment Pty Ltd, the Melbourne-based gaming group that develops products for their gambling brands.

Craven took the CEO role at Kick and remains its public face — he regularly announces creator signings, policy changes, and platform milestones. Tehrani stays largely behind the scenes on the Easygo and Stake side of the business. The operating entity, Kick Streaming Pty Ltd, was registered in Australia on November 14, 2022, with Craven's holding company Ashwood Holdings Pty Ltd among its shareholders.

Notably, Kick has taken no outside venture capital. Unlike Twitch (owned by Amazon) or YouTube (owned by Google), Kick remains fully founder-controlled, financed by the profits of its founders' gambling businesses.

This is the most common misconception about Kick — and the technically correct answer is no. Stake.com does not own Kick. Instead, both companies share the same owners: Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani control Stake, Easygo, and Kick, and all operate from the same Melbourne headquarters. Kick and Stake are sibling companies, not parent and subsidiary.

The practical relationship is still close. Kick launched roughly two months after Twitch banned streams of unlicensed gambling sites — including Stake — in October 2022. Kick's permissive stance on gambling content gave slots and casino streamers a new home, and Stake branding has been visible across Kick's biggest channels since day one. Sponsorships even extended to Formula 1: the Sauber team raced as the Stake F1 Team with Kick branding on the car during the 2024 and 2025 seasons.

So while "Kick is owned by Stake" is inaccurate on paper, "Kick and Stake are owned by the same people" is exactly right. For a deeper comparison of how this shapes the platform, see our Kick vs Twitch guide.

Kick launched in December 2022. The timeline moved fast: Twitch announced its gambling ban in September 2022 (effective October 18), Kick Streaming Pty Ltd was registered on November 14, 2022, and the platform went live to the public weeks later. Streamer Trainwreck (Tyler Niknam) announced the platform and joined as a non-owner advisor, becoming one of its earliest and loudest promoters.

Growth milestones since launch include xQc's headline-grabbing non-exclusive deal in June 2023 (reported at $70 million, with incentives potentially raising it to $100 million), a UFC partnership in October 2024, and a livestream by Donald Trump in August 2024 that peaked at roughly 580,000 concurrent viewers. By late 2025, Kick ranked as the fourth most-watched live streaming platform in the world — behind YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch.

You can track who currently dominates the platform in our top 20 Kick streamers list, updated monthly with hours-watched data.

Kick's business model is unusual for a streaming platform: it deliberately gives away the revenue stream its competitors rely on. Kick keeps only a 5% processing fee on streamer subscriptions, so subscription income barely covers costs. Ed Craven acknowledged in July 2023 that Kick was not yet profitable, with plans to reach profitability through advertising over the following years.

The platform's real economics run through its founders' gambling empire. Stake.com benefits from the gambling-friendly content Kick hosts — slots and casino streams that Twitch banned — making Kick a powerful marketing channel for the casino, even though the two companies are legally separate. In effect, the founders can afford to run Kick at a loss because it strengthens the ecosystem around their core business.

Kick does not publish revenue or valuation figures, has taken no outside funding, and its founders have publicly declined acquisition interest. For brands evaluating creators on the platform, our Kick influencer database tracks audience and engagement data across hundreds of channels.

The 95/5 revenue split — streamers keep 95% of subscription revenue, with 5% going to payment processing — was Kick's single most effective growth weapon. At launch, Twitch's standard split gave streamers only 50% of subscription revenue. Kick's offer was nearly double, and it made the platform's pitch impossible for creators to ignore.

The split worked because Kick never needed subscriptions to be profitable. With founders bankrolling the platform from gambling profits, Kick could treat creator payouts as a customer-acquisition cost rather than a margin problem. Combined with looser content rules and headline signings like xQc and Trainwreck, the 95/5 split pulled thousands of streamers away from Twitch in Kick's first two years.

For streamers deciding between platforms today, the split remains one of Kick's strongest arguments — we break down the full trade-offs in our Kick vs Twitch comparison.