Gurhan Kiziloz: The founder who survived bankruptcy five times and built a $1.2b revenue-generating company alone

After five bankruptcies and no outside backing, Gurhan Kiziloz rebuilt from the ground up to create Nexus International, a privately owned company that generated $1.2b in revenue.

In the tech world, most founders learn to speak in terms investors understand: traction, growth curves, exit multiples. Gurhan Kiziloz had none of that when he started over. After facing five bankruptcies, he didn’t rebrand or quietly disappear. He kept going, without capital, without institutional backing, and without applause. What followed was one of the most unorthodox rebuilds in recent entrepreneurial history: the creation of Nexus International, a privately held company that generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2025.

And he still owns 100% of it.

Kiziloz never set out to be a symbol for resilience. In fact, for years, his career looked like a cautionary tale. Early ventures collapsed. Funding dried up. Multiple banks turned away his restructuring attempts. But even as doors closed, he refused to exit the arena. Instead, he started cutting unnecessary layers, advisors, external boards, middle managers, and took full control of both vision and execution.

That decision would define the rest of his journey.

With no external capital, he built Nexus International from the ground up, using retained earnings to scale operations across three core platforms: Spartans.com, Megaposta, and Lanistar. The business now competes with multibillion-dollar giants across iGaming and digital payments, without ever raising a single venture round.

In 2024, Nexus International posted $400 million in revenue. One year later, the company tripled that number, reaching $1.2 billion. The primary driver of this growth was Spartans.com, a casino-focused platform that competes directly with market leaders like bet365 and Stake. While others diversified into sportsbook hybrids, Spartans remained focused on high-retention casino users, building a model around loyalty economics and proprietary reward structures.

Crucially, the $1.2 billion revenue figure came without diluting ownership. Kiziloz funded the $200 million needed for expansion from internal profits, not investor capital. That decision preserved control, speed, and margins, three levers that typically get compromised in hypergrowth phases.

His personal net worth is now estimated at $1.7 billion. But according to him, the real number worth watching is still far ahead. Kiziloz has never been interested in treating success as a milestone. His view is structural: revenue is only one indicator of how efficiently a business is being built. In a recent interview, he said:

“We’re not calling $1.2 billion a milestone. There’s much more scale to build. I’d call $100 billion a turning point. That’s where we’re going.”

The statement isn’t aspirational, it’s operational. Nexus International is expanding platform reach in Brazil, Europe, and new LATAM corridors, with licensing frameworks already in place. The company’s core brands operate under strict self-regulation, which Kiziloz believes will allow them to move faster than publicly traded competitors constrained by slow compliance cycles.

What makes Gurhan Kiziloz’s story different is not just the scale of the comeback. It’s how deliberately simple the structure is.

No outside investors.
No venture debt.
No boardroom deadlocks.

Kiziloz built his empire with a few core people, full control, and relentless decision-making. When something doesn’t work, he shuts it down. When something scales, he reinvests. There’s no quarterly guidance, no funding announcements, no liquidity events, just growth, funded by the last one.

That makes Nexus International less visible in VC circles but more formidable in operational terms. While most scale-ups trade speed for dilution, Kiziloz has found a way to accelerate without compromise. His ownership stake, still at 100%, makes him one of the rare founders to control a billion-dollar revenue stream without selling off a piece of the company. The story of Gurhan Kiziloz is not about being lucky, or timely, or even right. It’s about refusing to stop.

Five bankruptcies could have closed the door permanently. But instead, they removed the noise, the advisors, the distractions, and left one thing intact: control.

From that control came clarity. From that clarity came Nexus International.

And from Nexus International came $1.2 billion in 2025’s annual revenue, with no one else at the table.