Paddy Power was founded in 1988 by the merger of the 40 shops of three Irish bookmakers: Stewart Kenny, David Power, and John Corcoran. The Power name was considered the strongest brand among the merged shops.
In 2002 Paddy Power opened its first shop in the UK, since then the company has continued to expand its retail presence across the Irish Sea and as of 2013 now has more shops in the UK than in Ireland.
2004 saw the Paddy Power expand in to e-gaming for the first time with the launch of paddypowergames.com and paddypowercasino.com. The following year paddypowerpoker.com was launched which led to the company organising the world’s largest ever strip poker game in 2006, the same year that paddypowerbingo.com was unleashed.
In 2009 we expanded our operations to Australia by purchasing a 51% stake in online bookmaker Sportsbet.com.au before purchasing the remaining shares in the business the following year.
It was all about mobile in 2010 as we became the first online bookmaker to have a gambling app in the Apple app store. The app is now responsible for a large percentage of bets placed with the company and we celebrated our 1 millionth download in May of 2013.
Bulgarian based games and software development firm Cayetano became part of the Paddy Power family when it was acquired in 2011.
In 2014 Paddy Power opens a branch in Sofia, Bulgaria. The team in Sofia will be fully integrated into the E-Commerce team in Dublin working within the same methodologies and agile team structures. The facility in Sofia will be made up of software development engineers, quality assurance engineers, and automation developers.
