B2B investor focus with Chris Grove from Acies Investments

Chris Grove is a founding partner of Acies Investments. He has exited numerous affiliate businesses and is often quoted in the media for his insights into the iGaming industry.

As an investor with your ear to the ground in the iGaming space, what trends are you seeing in terms of the changes in the industry from startups and what investors are gravitating towards?

We’ve moved out of the phase where people were taking big swing at reinventing the sportsbook and into a phase where the ambitions of many startups are more modest and more B2B-centric. On the investing side, there’s definitely been a shift in terms of funders overweighting proof points like revenue, integrations, and so on. There’s also been a cooling of interest on the part of non-endemic funds that rode the sports betting hype wave into gambling and have now drifted back out.

The EGR Power Affiliates 2023 list features a lot of the usual suspects like Better Collective, Raketech, KaFe Rocks, Acroud and more. Do you think in the next few years there will new players challenging to crack this list? Or are these companies untouchable and only going to get bigger?

Affiliates work best at a very small scale or a very larger scale. It’s hard to do much in between. With that said, there’s certainly the potential that new technologies (especially generative AI) and the continued shift from print to video could break that structure and create space for challenger brands.

What is your take on the online bingo and online lottery verticals? It seems these 2 are never given much of a spotlight over casino, sportsbetting and poker. 

From the U.S. perspective, bingo is a weird product. It’s definitely familiar to much of the culture, but it’s also firmly rooted in the charitable (often church-based) scene, which complicates things. You do see bingo working in the skill-based products and I think you’ll see increasingly it featured at sweepstakes sites. Online lottery is definitely ascendant. The growth I’m seeing at companies like Jackpocket and the accompanying funding interest is absolutely worth keeping an eye on. And the few states that do have real-money online lottery put up impressive numbers. I think the relatively limited footprint for online lottery products in the U.S. is what mutes the broader excitement around the vertical.

Given your background in poker, do you think online poker is in trouble when it comes to how rampant it is for pros playing under multiple accounts and perhaps the rise of bots?

Online poker has been in trouble more or less since day one. Cheating, angle-shooting, and skill gap have threatened the industry from the drop. The question has always been how diluted that trouble is as a function of the overall ecosystem, and how fast it can threaten the stability of the ecosystem. I think we passed the tipping point several years ago.

With AI being the word of the year, what excites or scares you about AI finding its way into online gambling?

I’m not sure that anything scares me about AI finding its way into online gambling. This take may not age well, we’ll see.

With online gambling growing year over year, from what other industries do we need more of to cross over into iGaming?

This is a bit of a cheat answer, but we need more of the retail gambling industry to cross over into online gambling. We need more Vegas. We need to find ways to create richer experiences that blend live and online, because the online gambling product is competing with a deep, deep well of other mobile games that’s growing by the day.

What podcasts do you listen to, either in iGaming or in business?

Most of the podcasts I listen to are comedy – Doughboys, Podcast the Ride, that sort of thing. Invest Like The Best is the one business podcast I listen to regularly. Betting Startups and the iGaming Next podcasts are the two industry podcasts that are regulars in my feed.