4 Reflections From The World's Largest Gambling Industry Conference
And why I think the gambling industry is a wildly attractive category for VCs
This week I traveled to Barcelona for the world’s largest gambling industry conference, called ICE.
Yes, in 2026, ICE (the International Casinos Exhibition) could use a rebrand.
But their business was humming. 65,000 people over 3 days packed into 6 massive conference halls, lined with sports betting, iGaming, land-based casino companies. David Foster Wallace would’ve had a blast writing about it.
I had a blast myself. Will Ventures hosted a dinner for 15 founders and operators. I caught up with a bunch of investor friends. And I spent hours roaming the conference floor checking out different companies.
Here was my biggest takeaway: Gambling is a wildly attractive VC investment category.
B2C gambling operators — sportsbooks, online casinos, etc. — check the two boxes that are table stakes for VC-backable categories:
They can reach multi-billion dollar valuations, and
They scale highly efficiently with capital
But at ICE, I kept thinking of 4 things that make the gambling industry even more attractive than other categories.
1. Constant regulatory instability means constant opportunity
This year the hottest company at the party was, hands-down, Stake.
In 2025, just 8 years since its founding, the offshore casino & sportsbook did $6.5 billion in revenue by my estimates1. For perspective, DraftKings projected ~$6 billion in revenue. (And Stake is definitely more profitable because of lower taxes and better margins on casino vs sportsbook). At ICE Stake had a cool exhibit with a robot soccer goalie that nobody could score on, and huge LED screens of their ambassadors like Drake and Israel Adesanya.
Stake’s success is thanks to regulatory arbitrage. Across the world, consumers have grown tired of their countries’ strict gambling regulations, downloaded a VPN, and started playing on offshore, crypto-based platforms like Stake, Roobet and Shuffle.
Or look at prediction markets in the US. In the last year, the CFTC greenlit sports betting as federally-sanctioned, not just state-sanctioned – paving the way for Kalshi and Polymarket. Ironically these two companies were the talk of ICE, but were nowhere to be seen. Kalshi and Polymarket are trying to brand themselves as financial / trading platforms, not gambling platforms, so ICE would have been a bad look.
I’d argue regulatory instability is endemic to the gambling business. Gambling’s a complicated political and moral topic. E.g. Should a Republican take the free-market stance that people should spend their money how they want, or the social conservative stance that gambling is family- and virtue-eroding? That’s why the gambling industry is constantly in regulatory flux across countries. And that instability creates opportunity for new entrants.
That instability also broaches questions about which companies will reach stable regulatory states and let investors exit. FanDuel and DraftKings, which started in daily fantasy before landing as sportsbooks, are the shining examples here. PrizePicks also just found a landing spot. But massive companies like the sweepstakes sportsbook Fliff and the crypto casino Stake still have exit risks. The bet is that the best founding teams and brands will eventually figure out their regulatory end-state and exit strategy.
2. Gamblers always want to engage with new brands
I think CPG is an awesome VC-backable category because consumers always want to interact with fresh brands that speak to them. Hershey’s brand got tired so we got Feastables. Unhealthy sodas became less fashionable, so we got Poppi and Olipop.
The same dynamic applies in gambling. Gamblers know most platforms provide the same sports betting UI/UX, off-the-shelf casino games, and retention bonuses. But gamblers want to interact with brands that feel fresh and speak to them.
At ICE I caught up with Alan and Joey from Draftea. They saw that most sports bettors in Mexico were using Caliente, an incumbent with old-school branding and UI/UX. Draftea launched a Gen Z-forward betting product and brand, and they’ve been crushing it. Other examples of Gen Z challenger brands I love are Dabble in Australia and Midnite in the UK.
I’d argue as AI coding and media tools make it easier to spin up a new gambling platform, more and more of the alpha will be in branding.
3. The gambling industry has tons of white space for AI
I was actually surprised how few companies at ICE mentioned AI. Some exhibitors like BetConstruct – a B2B backend tech provider – slapped AI onto the end of their name. But I didn’t see many new AI-native companies.
Online gambling is truly a dream application area for AI — it has tons of consumer data, huge leverage from personalization, and plenty of labor-heavy but automatable operations. AI can help develop game content faster and cheaper; target consumers with more customized ads; offer VIPs better customer service; and much more.
As an example, take live dealer games. Evolution Gaming, which had a huge booth, does ~$2 billion in annual revenue selling off-the-shelf casino games. One large vertical is live dealer, where real human dealers run games like blackjack or roulette on real-time video streams. BetHog (a Will Ventures portfolio company) recently unveiled the first AI blackjack dealer. The product’s still early, but it’s a really exciting example of AI applied to iGaming.
4. Consumer demand for gambling is booming
Lastly, there are major macro tailwinds behind gambling. In 2025, gambling was definitely in the American zeitgeist – due to the rise of prediction markets, the NBA betting scandal, and record growth of gambling activity.
The American Gaming Association reported 57% of US adults gambled in 2025 – up from 49% in 2023. That’s a big jump in two years.
Many have tried to explain this shift in consumer behavior. Some cite financial nihilism, as young people lack economic mobility and seek upside from gambling. Some cite phone addiction, as people crave more and more dopamine rushes. Some cite loose regulations, as sportsbooks and financial brokerages alike have flooded our feeds with ads.
Many will say this growing gambling behavior is bad for society. But I’d argue it’s a more complicated debate, for a couple reasons…
There’s an increasingly blurry line between gambling and investment decisions. Is a r/WallStreetBets contributor who day-trades on Robinhood investing or gambling?
Many forms of modern-day entertainment have negative consequences. Is it worse for a teenager to regularly bet on sports, or doomscroll TikTok brainrot?
I’ll write a longer Substack on these questions soon. But regardless of where one lands, the reality is gambling activity continues to grow, and so does the TAM of the space.
Anyway, those are my takeaways from Barcelona. Happy to be back in New York. If you’ll be in San Francisco for Super Bowl Week let me know!
2026
year of the challenger brand