FIRST.com: How a UK Betting Unicorn’s Malta Lab Is Preparing to Storm America

Valletta’s iGaming corridors have a new name on everyone’s lips: FIRST.com. The UK-licensed sportsbook, which soft-launched in February and went full-throttle for the Champions League final, is already being sized up by St Julian’s analysts as the fastest British brand to hit seven-figure active users since the 2020 lockdown boom. But what has Malta buzzing is not the neon-soaked London billboards or the Premier League shirt deals—it’s the whisper that FIRST’s Series C war-chest is earmarked for a 2025 assault on the still-federally-fragile US market. In short: the island that wrote the playbook on remote gaming may soon be coaching the next trans-Atlantic expansion.

For Maltese readers, the plot is familiar. Fifteen years ago we watched Betfair, Unibet and LeoVegas pivot from cramped Sliema lofts to NASDAQ bells. FIRST’s trajectory feels like a remake with a bigger budget. The company’s Malta hub—quietly opened in Q1 inside the former Quickfire office overlooking Spinola Bay—already employs 42 traders, compliance officers and CRM creatives, most poached from Kindred and Tipico. “We are not a fly-by-night dot-com,” country manager Rebecca Micallef told this newspaper over a cappuccino at Café du Brazil. “Our platform was engineered in Sweden, licensed by the UKGC, but the cultural brain is here. Malta is where we test promotions on Eurovision prop bets and where we localise the bonusing engine for Ramadan-specific schedules. If we can make it work on a rock where 500,000 people argue in three languages, we can export it to New Jersey.”

That export strategy matters to more than shareholders. Every extra desk at FIRST’s Malta HQ is estimated to inject €68,000 annually into the local economy—rent, restaurant tabs, marina gym memberships. At capacity the office will house 120 staff, translating to roughly €8.2 million of fresh spending in a town that still hasn’t forgotten the 2021 Yggdrasil lay-offs. Government statistics show iGaming already contributes 12% of GDP; if FIRST’s US gamble pays off, the island could become the back-office for American in-play odds the same way it once became the licensing depot for Italian poker skins.

Yet the cultural significance runs deeper than euros. Maltese identity has long been stitched to foreign empires—Phoenician, Knights, British, Instagram influencers. Watching a British startup choose Malta as its “laboratory” flips that history: we are no longer merely colonised consumers but architects of a digital product that Californians might soon tap on their iPhones during Lakers time-outs. Walk into any Gżira bar at 11 pm and you’ll find twenty-somethings bragging that the cash-out algorithm which just mugged a guy in Manhattan was written by their cousin who went to Giovanni Curmi Higher Secondary. It’s a rare psychographic dividend in a country used to exporting limestone and nurses.

Community impact, however, is double-edged. Local addiction NGOs worry that FIRST’s hyper-speed “Bet Builder”—which lets users stitch together same-game parlays in under eight seconds—may normalise impulsive wagering among Maltese punters before the tool even reaches Ohio. “We’re not anti-business,” says Claudette Abela Baldacchino, coordinator at Responsible Gaming Malta. “But when firms field-test their most aggressive products here, we become the canary in the coal mine. By the time the US debates player protection, our youths have already served as data points.” FIRST counters that it has earmarked €500,000 for local awareness campaigns and funds a University of Malta PhD on early-detection algorithms—small change compared with projected revenues, but more than some predecessors ever offered.

Regulators are cautiously optimistic. MGA CEO Carl Brincat recently name-checked FIRST in a speech to the Malta iGaming Excellence Awards, praising “operators who choose our jurisdiction not for loopholes but for talent.” Translation: after grey-listing scares and Italian advertising bans, the island needs squeaky-clean flag-bearers. If FIRST can persuade American investors that “Malta” equals “integrity” rather than “tax sleight-of-hand,” the entire sector breathes easier.

Bottom line? Whether FIRST.com becomes the next DraftKings or fizzles out like so many other “disruptors,” its Malta chapter is already reshaping the narrative. A nation once written off as a Mediterranean side-door for multinationals is now the green-room where British bookies rehearse their American dream. For local coders, baristas and landlords, that dream smells like freshly ground coffee and new lease agreements—at least until the US regulators wake up.