Exclusive: OpenBet to take a stake in Strive Gaming

Strive fundraising rumors, VICI and Tabcorp earnings reactions, startup focus – HoldCrunch +More

Feb 26, 2024

OpenBet is rumored to be taking a minority stake in Strive Gaming.
In +More: BetInvest and Abios colab, Light & Wonder get set to report.
VICI sees positives in murky conditions.
Retail betting win in Victoria will provide a boost for Tabcorp.
Startup focus is odds impact quantifier HoldCrunch.

Strive fundraising rumors

Strive a hard bargain: Strive Gaming is on the verge of announcing a $5m funding round, with OpenBet taking up the majority of the new money. According to sources, the new investment will value the business at $50m.

It is believed the investment round is being put together by Oakvale.
No one at Strive, Oakvale or OpenBet’s parent company Endeavor replied to enquiries from E+M.

Built with you in mind: Strive bills itself as a full-service omnichannel iGaming platform built for the North American market and its most recent product launch was a PAM. It has done deals with Desert Diamond and DraftKings’ Golden Nugget in Arizona, Betsson’s Betsafe in Colorado and with Four Winds Casinos in Michigan.

In December the company signed a strategic partnership with PointsBet in Canada for the provision of the Infinity Engine iCasino tech product (see below).
The Vancouver-based Strive is led by Max Meltzer. There are scant details of any other funding events.

Minority report: An investment on the part of OpenBet would represent its first foray into the area of iCasino since it was sold to Endeavor by Light & Wonder in Oct22 for $800m, albeit at the remove of merely being a minority shareholder.

Floods: The new funding round would come at a time when the market for growth company investment appears to be in considerably better shape than it was in the second half of 2023.

According to tracking of sector-specific deals undertaken by Earnings+More, a total of 10 funding rounds have been announced since the turn of the year raising at least $33.8m.

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BetInvest and Abios have announced a collaboration to work on providing eFootball content from the CyberLive!Arena and Esport Pro Club professional leagues.

Mohegan Sun has announced that its management arrangement at Resorts Casino in Atlantic City will come to an end in December. The deal dates back to 2012 when Mohegan became the first tribal operator in New Jersey and took a 10% stake in the property.

The week ahead

Light & Wonder is likely to reiterate its confidence in hitting its 2025 EBITDA target of $1.4bn when it reports on Tuesday. A note late last year from Macquarie said the company was in the early stages of executing its cross-platform strategy.

Also reporting this week are Gaming and Leisure Properties, Lottomatica, Melco Resorts, Golden Entertainment and Codere Online, which as noted in Friday’s newsletter enjoyed a 50%+ share price surge last week.

In Compliance+More this week, a look at the possibility the new stake limits to be introduced in the UK could bolster the burgeoning black market to the tune of nearly half-a-billion pounds.

What we’re reading

Handle with care: TechCrunch looks at how the Reddit IPO filing makes clear the r/WallStreetBets crowd could make its own stock liable to “extreme volatility” for reasons unrelated to its underlying business.

Quote of the week

Nvidious: “There is a dislocation between valuations versus fundamentals. That happened in 2000. The market might as well be renamed from Nasdaq to DraftKings – it’s a trading casino.” Ted Mortonson, a tech strategist at Baird in the FT.

Careers+More

Glitnor has appointed Mel Camilleri-Bland as its COO of B2C operations. She joins from BV Group.

Robert Finch has resigned from his position as COO at Red Rock Resorts but will remain until July 31. Kord Nichols will replace him.

VICI seeking visibility

‘Skiing inside a milk bottle’: Gaming REIT CEO Ed Pitoniak said such was the lack of visibility on the economic situation in much of 2023 and now into 2024, the outlook was like “living and working in Whistler” with conditions “foggy and whited out.”

But the VICI team “kept pioneering,” he said, adding both gaming and non-gaming properties to its portfolio.
He added that “in a macro environment of constrained capital conditions”, VICI’s capital resources – it has $3.5bn of liquidity – will be attractive to operators that “want to grow and or need liquidity.”

On the wagon: Asked about the potential deal pipeline, Pitoniak said, in line with other non-gaming REITs that have reported recently, VICI remained “sober” about any potential activity.

While VICI will continue to make forays into areas such as wellness and experiential properties, John Payne, COO, reiterated the REIT is wedded to gaming. “The casino business continues to be a real focus of our company,” he said.

Asked about the recently opened Fontainebleau, where there has been some coverage of management changes, Pitoniak refused to be downbeat.
“Some of the press coverage has been quite negative, but we know the people involved, we know how hard they’re working,” he said. “That asset is utterly magnificent.”

Selling it: Asked generally about the prospects in Las Vegas, Pitoniak said he “couldn’t emphasize enough” how valuable VICI’s positioning was. “Las Vegas is reaching a global critical mass that really is like no other place on Earth right now,” he added.

Retail game-changer for Tabcorp

Victorian values: Winning the exclusive retail betting license in Victoria in December under improved terms will be a “game-changer” for Tabcorp, said CEO Adam Rytenskild, who added the state will go from being the lowest margin market to Tabcorp’s best license when it moves to the new tax regime as of August.

However, softness in the six months to December meant wagering and media revenues fell 4% to A$1.12bn ($735m) while EBITDA fell 13% to A$134m.
The company also took a non-cash charge of A$732m against certain of its assets in New South Wales and South Australia.

Winning them over: Rytenskild noted Tabcorp’s online operations continued to take market share, with turnover and GGR gains in both racing and sports, and that the company had “closed the product gap” with the market leaders. In Q4 the digital business saw market share improve to 24%+.

Foot in the water: Dabble, in which Tabcorp is a 20% shareholder, recently launched its social betting app in the US and Rytenskild said it had generated 630k registrations and 440k active users already and was no. 2 in the App Store in January.

He added that Dabble is also performing well in Australia, giving Tabcorp insight into a different customer segment.

PointsBet earnings review

Head above water: The company said its Australian business made its first-ever profit at an EBITDA level in H1 after marketing expenses fell 37% while revenue rose 7% to A$102m ($67m). However, the A$0.9m in Australian profit was swamped by continuing losses of A$12m in the Canadian business.

Canada is the rump of the North America venture, with Fanatics now having taken over operations in 13 of the 14 states.
Group revenue rose 15% to A$118m, while EBITDA losses were cut back significantly to A$13m from A$46m in the prior-year period.

Going Strive: Talking about the partnership with Strive Gaming, CEO Sam Swanell said it was expected the broader set of games and “enhanced overall experience” would accelerate growth in the iCasino business.

iCasino net win in the six months more than doubled to A$9.5m helping to push total revenue up 138% to A$15.9m.
Swanell said having iCasino “definitely helps the path to profitability.”

Careers+More: PointsBet also announced it has hired Dan Lucas as its new CTO. Lucas joins from Flutter where he was head of technology trading.

Venture capital firm Yolo Investments manages in excess of €500m in capital across 100 exciting fintech, gaming and blockchain companies. The Yolo Investments' Gaming fund, regulated by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission, has taken positions in fast-growth suppliers and operators, including Dabble and Enteractive. Yolo Investments (yolo.io) wants to hear from readers of this newsletter. Get in touch with your pitch, or for a chat about innovative products which can plug into our investment ecosystem.

Earnings in brief

Genting Singapore: The Resorts World Sentosa IR saw H223 revenue rise 26% to S$1.3bn ($968m) while adj. EBITDA was up 13% to S$573m, as Singapore continued its post-pandemic recovery. For FY23, adj. EBITDA was up 38% to S$1.03bn on revenues up 40% to S$2.4bn.

SkyCity Entertainment: The New Zealand casino operator has reaffirmed its guidance for FY24 for underlying group EBITDA of between NZ$290m ($180m) and NZ$310m after seeing H124 EBITDA fall 5% to NZ$143m on revenue down slightly to NZ$490m.

The company confirmed the planned departure of CEO Michael Ahearne at the start of March, but is yet to name a replacement.

Analyst takes – Churchill Downs

Bigger, later, more expensive: The team at Jefferies noted the news that Churchill Downs’ new HRM facility in Dumfries, Virginia, would be delivered later and with a more expensive price tag of $460m, albeit with more machines than originally forecast. Truist said the rationale for expansion in the scope of the Rose project was the large and affluent population of the Northern Virginia market.

JMP pointed out the Rose was just one project from Churchill Downs’ “year of heavy investment.”
They noted management also “alluded to unannounced projects in the pipeline,” suggesting 2025 will see further “above-average ROIC opportunities.”

Startup focus – HoldCrunch

Hold that thought: Founded in 2023 by UK-based CEO Tom Johnson (ex-Betfair and FanDuel) with TXOdds, which supplies the pricing data, HoldCunch – put simply – “quantifies the impact of price in the US betting market.” Via a subscription service, it is aimed at investors, analysts and anyone following the industry who want a “more complete picture” of sportsbook performance.

Funding backgrounder: Other than investment from sportsbook data partner TXOdds, HoldCrunch is self-funded.

Crunching the numbers: Johnson claims the company’s data and analysis is an “industry first” because it “answers important questions that have not been answered before,” such as whether distance in price between DraftKings and FanDuel results in handle share movements? How far do challengers need to compete on price to gain share? And are US customers price sensitive?

The company also quantifies the impact of price on margins, looking at which sportsbooks are displaying operational excellence by having high GGR/NGR margins while offering customers the best prices at the same time.

As well as whether some have high margins in part because they’re not competing on price and asking which is the more cost efficient way of acquiring and retaining customers, price or promo spend?

Impact point: “The reason we use the word ‘impact’ so much is that’s what’s important about price and what has been particularly challenging in the time we’ve been developing the product,” says Johnson. “It’s relatively easy to say ‘this book is better/worse on price than this other book’. But ‘so what? That’s the tough part. What does that mean for handle share? Margin performance? Market share? These are the questions HoldCrunch has managed to answer.”

Johnson adds that without price “our data shows there’s a significant blind spot when assessing market share dynamics in the US.”

The art of conversation: Success for Johnson is “bringing the impact of price into the US sportsbook conversation. Even better would be our data becoming the industry reference point for the impact of price.”

Growth company news

Sports and betting-related venture capital firm SeventySix Capital has promoted Chad Stender to the post of managing partner alongside founder Wayne Kimmel.

Calendar

Feb 27: Light & Wonder, Gaming and Leisure Properties (e)
Feb 28: Gaming and Leisure Properties (call), Accel
Feb 29: Codere Online, Golden Entertainment, Lottomatica, Melco

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