BetHog Shutting Down Crypto Casino, Shifting Focus Entirely To Sentient Studios

Entrepreneurial success starts with innovative ideas and endless ambition, but sometimes the key to making a company work over the long haul is a willingness to pivot. FanDuel co-founders Nigel Eccles and Rob Jones revealed themselves to have just such a willingness when they announced Monday morning a full pivot away from their crypto casino, BetHog, and toward their AI dealer product, Sentient Studios.

BetHog launched with $6 million in seed funding in November 2024, followed this April by a $10 million funding round primarily directed toward the launch of Sentient Studios. According to BetHog, the AI dealer product is driving so much interest that, as of July 31, the online casino will be shuttered and the team will focus entirely on the Sentient Studios side of things.

“We only really made the decision very recently,” Eccles told Casino Reports. “With the level of interest we are now seeing in AI dealer, we felt we needed to make the decision.”

The Sentient Studios games have only been available on BetHog thus far, and the company told Casino Reports that “BetHog's engineering team has already shifted focus to Sentient Studios' AI dealer, and the underlying technology is being folded into Sentient Studios.”

Neither BetHog nor Sentient Studios is presently licensed to operate in the regulated U.S. market. The global customers who play on BetHog will have to withdraw their funds by July 31.

Evolving graphics, interested operators

Sentient Studios’ trademark product is the photo-realistic AI dealer “Sunny” (who looked more like an anime character when first unveiled last year). The studio has since added lip sync, improved the dealers’ hand-eye coordination, and launched a second AI dealer, “Tong,” a native Chinese speaker who deals baccarat.

The company says Sentient Studios has drawn interest from “tier-one operators” looking to license the AI dealer product and expects several of those partnerships to go live later this year. Eventually, the hope is to bring the product to the U.S.

“The U.S. market is definitely going to be a key one for us,” Eccles said. “Our view in talking to lawyers and regulators is that AI dealer would be classed as an RNG game,” he added, indicating he’s not concerned about it meeting state regulatory standards.

Naturally, some will infer from the change-of-focus news that BetHog was not a commercially successful venture, but Eccles denies that’s the case.

“Honestly, I think crypto casino is a great industry,” he said, “and BetHog could have become a very successful business. However, we just felt Sentient Studios was a better fit with our product expertise and we really needed to focus in order for it to be successful.”