Ruth Parasol

Ruth Parasol is the online-gambling entrepreneur who co-founded PartyGaming plc, the Gibraltar-based company behind PartyPoker.com. She does not currently hold a public executive role in the gambling industry and is generally referred to in media and financial profiles as a former founder and board member of PartyGaming.

In 1997, Parasol and her then-husband Russell DeLeon, together with software developer Anurag Dikshit, co-founded the business that became PartyGaming plc. The company launched PartyPoker.com in 2001, and the site grew rapidly into one of the world’s largest online poker rooms during the early-2000s poker boom.

PartyGaming listed on the London Stock Exchange in June 2005, a flotation that briefly made Parasol one of Britain’s best-known newly created billionaires. Later that year she left the PartyGaming board, and she has since stayed out of the day-to-day operations of the gambling industry.

Her later public profile has been that of a private investor and philanthropist rather than an active gambling-industry executive.