Nexus International, a privately owned digital gaming and fintech group, reported $1.2 billion in revenue for 2025, a notable achievement in any context, but especially rare for a company with no outside funding or venture capital. In an interview, founder and chairman Gurhan Kiziloz has laid out his future ambitions, and they are anything but modest. Known for rejecting outside funding and building one of the world’s fastest-growing private tech groups from the ground up, Kiziloz is now setting his sights on a far larger milestone.
“We’re not calling $1.2 billion a milestone,” he told Gulf News. “There’s much more scale to build. I’d call $100 billion a turning point. That’s where we’re going.”
Few founders have traveled a road as difficult or as defining. Kiziloz has gone bankrupt five times, each failure public, painful, and unforgiving. Unlike Silicon Valley’s sanitized version of failure, where a failed startup becomes a badge of honor and a stepping stone to the next funding round, Kiziloz had no soft landing. Rejected by venture capitalists after the collapse of his earlier company Lanistar, he made a critical decision: to stop asking for money and become his own investor.
That decision birthed Nexus International, a holding group that today spans crypto gaming, blockchain infrastructure, and payment services. With no VC safety net, no boardroom approvals, and no equity dilution, Kiziloz turned necessity into strategy. Nexus’s $1.2B in 2025 revenue came from sheer operational scale, not financial engineering.
At the core of Kiziloz’s system is a model he describes as “brutal simplicity.” Management is flat, decisions are centralized, and bureaucracy is nonexistent. Each brand under the Nexus umbrella operates independently but follows the same mandate: speed, execution, and cashflow. There are no venture decks or quarterly distractions, only output.
“We don’t allow people to overcomplicate things,” he explained. “The best things in life are simple. We simplified management, systems, and strategy. That’s what created a winning model.”
This no-frills framework allows the group to outpace competitors who often move slower under layers of governance and shareholder appeasement. It also allows for sharp internal course correction. Earlier this year, when performance at BlockDAG fell short of expectations, Kiziloz dismissed the entire leadership team within a single day.
Where most tech companies operate based on projected valuation, Nexus International operates based on realized cashflow. Kiziloz has never sought a public listing or private equity deal, and he maintains 100% ownership of his empire. That control allows him to think long term, investing in infrastructure instead of optics.
Kiziloz’s statement that $100 billion, not $1 billion, marks the true turning point for Nexus isn’t just bravado. It reflects a deeper ideology about scale, control, and permanence. To reach that figure, Nexus plans to do more than grow revenue. It plans to replace traditional intermediaries across entire digital ecosystems.
“We’re not looking to exit. We’re not looking to get acquired. This is not a pitch. It’s a system. And it’s being built to last,” Kiziloz said.
As part of this long-horizon thinking, Nexus International is expanding its presence in Latin America, where its Brazil-facing brand Megaposta has already exceeded expectations due to early licensing wins and high transaction retention. The group is also considering direct hardware integration and localized payment stacks to further deepen its control over the user experience.
In a time when tech founders often become diluted stakeholders in their own companies, Gurhan Kiziloz stands out as a stark exception. He holds complete control, dictates pace, and owns responsibility for both success and failure.
This founder-first model has its risks, but it also gives Nexus International something rare in modern tech: focus. With no fundraising deadlines and no investor consensus to manage, the group is free to make moves that benefit the system rather than appease capital.
