The Irish entrepreneur was co-founder of Ebeon, a much hyped but ill-starred web venture backed by Eircom, which perished during the tech downturn in 2001.

Crowley, who had left Ebeon before the company ran into difficulty, appears to be enjoying greater success with Inspired Gaming.

The company supplies content, such as fruit-machine style games, from a central server. Its technology allows traditional gaming machines in pubs, casinos and bookmakers to be re-purposed to play many different types of games, supplied on demand by Inspired.

"We deploy about 90m worth of new gaming machines every year in the UK market, " Crowley said.

He and co-chief exec Luke Alvarez sold 70% of Inspired Gaming to gaming machine operator Leisure Link in 2002 for 8m. Now the company is buying back its former majority owner. Management, including Crowley, will retain about 5% of the shares.

Inspired is also in the process of finalising the acquisition of animation and graphics specialist Redvision, which will bolster its game design and content production division.

Inspired provides what it describes as "server-based gaming" to 32,000 machines in the UK, Italy, Australia and the US. The company had turnover of 16m and made a pre-tax loss of 9m in 2004, according to the most recent accounts filed with the UK companies office.

Figures filed by Leisure Link for the same year state that Inspired Gaming moved into profit on an operating basis in June 2004.