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Rapidpace powers online gaming ops with smart, secure, and scalable tech.
Project representative: MJ M.
In the ever-evolving world of online gaming, the spotlight tends to shine on flashy front-end experiences — blockbuster titles, immersive visuals, and record-breaking jackpots. But behind every successful gaming platform lies a web of deeply complex, often fragile operational infrastructure. And for many online casinos, it’s exactly that back-end machinery — from compliance and fraud prevention to customer support and payment processing — that determines whether a business survives its first year.
Enter Rapidpace Managed Services, a Malta-based startup on a mission to overhaul the unseen but essential foundation of the global iGaming industry.
Founded by industry veterans Tony Ciccocelli and MJ Mirzazadeh, each bringing over 20 years of experience in online gaming operations, Rapidpace is not a typical gaming startup. It doesn’t build games or chase viral engagement. Instead, it focuses on everything else that makes online gaming work — the unglamorous, high-stakes logistics of running a secure, compliant, and efficient digital casino. Like many successful founders, Ciccocelli and Mirzazadeh likely began with a comprehensive business strategy plan that identified this critical gap in the market.
Rapidpace launched with a clear and practical vision: to empower online gaming providers globally by optimizing operations, improving compliance performance, and ultimately enabling sustainable, profitable growth. It’s a vision born not from theory, but from lived experience — from watching countless gaming platforms fail not because they lacked users, but because they lacked operational resilience.
In the world of iGaming, that failure rate is astonishing. Estimates suggest that over 95% of online casinos fold within their first year, often due to internal disorganization, regulatory missteps, fragmented toolsets, or ineffective fraud management. These aren’t problems that most users ever see — but they are the quiet killers of the industry. Successful infrastructure startups like Rapidpace understand the importance of comprehensive market analysis to identify these hidden pain points and build solutions that address specific industry challenges.
At the heart of Rapidpace’s offering is a suite of next-gen technologies — including blockchain, AI-driven automation for real-time fraud detection and negotiation, and fintech APIs — that work together to merge the traditionally fragmented FX process into a single, streamlined platform.
The company is building what it sees as a unified control panel for FX, where users can monitor, manage, and execute currency conversions in real time, without relying on third parties to approve or delay their transactions. This approach to creating a comprehensive platform solution mirrors the methodologies recommended in modern startup financial modeling, which emphasizes integrated solutions that tackle multiple pain points simultaneously.
Security and speed are baked into the infrastructure, making Rapidpace not just a cheaper alternative, but a smarter and faster one too.
The FX space is crowded, with incumbents like PayPal Business, CurrencyFair, and Airwallex already serving digital-savvy clients. Banks, too, continue to dominate large segments of the market — even as dissatisfaction with their slow and expensive models grows.
Still, Rapidpace is undeterred. What they offer isn’t just another way to send money — it’s a business-centric FX operating system that puts power directly in the hands of its users. Unlike platforms that treat businesses as consumers, Rapidpace is designed by and for operators who need to move fast and minimize cost.
Their emphasis on real-time negotiation, fee transparency, and instant settlement gives them a key differentiator that many legacy players simply can’t match. This type of competitive positioning is crucial for startups and can be greatly enhanced with tools that provide detailed competitor analysis, helping companies like Rapidpace identify and articulate their unique advantages in the marketplace.
Over the past six months, Rapidpace has been in deep MVP refinement mode, fine-tuning their platform to handle instant FX transactions at scale. The result is a system ready to move from prototype to production, backed by early partnerships and growing market interest.
The company’s roadmap includes:
They also plan to expand their liquidity management capabilities — a critical move for ensuring stability and scalability as transaction volume grows. For tech infrastructure startups like Rapidpace, securing appropriate funding is often crucial to executing an ambitious roadmap. Many founders find success by leveraging specialized investor matching platforms that connect them with investors experienced in their specific industry vertical.
What’s striking is how much Rapidpace has achieved in a short time, and with relatively modest resources. The startup has been predominantly self-funded, with the founders investing €200,000 of their own capital. Yet despite the bootstrapped beginning, Rapidpace has already achieved €830,000 in revenue and €190,000 in net profit, with a growing client base that is projected to triple in the coming year.
This growth hasn’t been driven by hype or hype-fueled spending. Instead, it has come from disciplined execution and a product that actually solves real, painful problems. By consolidating what used to be handled by five or six different vendors into a single streamlined experience, Rapidpace has helped its clients reduce operational overhead, improve fraud detection, and boost conversion rates by 15% — all while staying compliant in an increasingly complex regulatory environment.
For bootstrapped companies like Rapidpace that are ready to accelerate growth, having a professional pitch deck is essential for communicating their value proposition and proven traction to potential investors and partners.
Rapidpace sees itself not just as a tool, but as a movement against outdated systems that no longer serve the pace and needs of modern business. For too long, FX has been a backend function. Rapidpace wants to bring it front and center — putting speed, visibility, and savings at the core of every transaction.
Their long-term vision is to create a global network where businesses aren’t just clients in someone else’s FX chain — they’re participants with full control over how they buy, sell, and move currency. Developing such an ambitious vision often requires founders to engage in structured planning sessions. Many successful tech entrepreneurs use AI-powered business planning tools to refine their vision and create a coherent long-term strategy.
Looking ahead, the company’s 18-month roadmap includes expanding its multilingual capabilities, investing in platform scalability, and ramping up its participation in major industry expos and conferences — not just to showcase the brand, but to listen, learn, and shape its product roadmap around the evolving needs of its clients.
At the center of this growth plan is a simple idea: that every online gaming company — from small startups to mid-size operators — deserves the same level of operational support and technological capability as the biggest industry players. And that by lowering the barrier to sophisticated infrastructure, Rapidpace can not only capture a meaningful slice of the market, but raise the overall standard of what gaming platforms can and should expect.
For industry-specific startups like Rapidpace that are targeting niche markets, having access to specialized accelerator programs can provide crucial connections and resources that accelerate growth and market penetration.
In a sector where the failure rate is high and the tolerance for error is low, Rapidpace isn’t chasing headlines — it’s building the infrastructure that quietly keeps the industry afloat. And as online gaming becomes more global, more regulated, and more competitive, that quiet work may prove to be the most valuable bet of all.
For entrepreneurs inspired by Rapidpace’s approach to solving critical infrastructure problems, there are valuable lessons in how they’ve identified a specific pain point, leveraged technology to create a comprehensive solution, and executed with discipline rather than hype. Aspiring founders can accelerate their own journey by utilizing comprehensive startup resources that guide them through the process of validating ideas, building business models, and securing the partnerships needed for success in complex technical industries.
