The casino family that made online betting actually pay

In the online gambling business, growth has always been the easy part. Any operator with a big enough marketing budget can rent a stadium of customers for a season. Keeping them, and turning them into money, is the hard part - and it is the part where most of the industry's would-be champions quietly fell apart. Rush Street Interactive spent a decade doing it the other way around.

The Chicago company is the operator behind BetRivers, PlaySugarHouse and RushBet - a set of online casino and sportsbook brands that now run across roughly 15 US states, the Canadian province of Ontario, and a growing slice of Latin America. In 2025 it reported revenue of about $1.13 billion, up 23% year over year, and net income of $74 million. Two years earlier, it had been posting losses. That turnaround, more than any single product, is the story worth telling.

What makes Rush Street Interactive unusual is where it came from. It was not a software startup that discovered gambling. It was a gambling company that learned software. The firm was founded in 2012 by Neil Bluhm, Greg Carlin and Richard Schwartz, out of the same group that runs the Rivers and SugarHouse casinos. The people building the app already knew how a casino floor treats a regular - the comps, the loyalty tiers, the hospitality math - and they carried those instincts online.

“We're in the entertainment business.” Rush Street Interactive, on its own culture

01 / What it doesA casino, a sportsbook and a poker room in your pocket

Strip away the branding and Rush Street Interactive is a real-money gaming operator. It runs its own proprietary platform - not a licensed third-party one - and layers three products on top of it: online casino, sports betting, and, most recently, poker. The casino side hosts more than 5,500 games, from slots to live-dealer tables. The sportsbook handles betting on the usual leagues, and integrates with the physical Rivers Casino sportsbooks where they exist. In June 2025 the company launched a multi-state BetRivers Poker Network, pooling players across jurisdictions so the tables actually fill up.

The three brands split the map. BetRivers is the flagship, carrying both sportsbook and casino across most US states and Ontario. PlaySugarHouse is the older name, still strong in New Jersey and Pennsylvania where the company's online story began. RushBet is the international badge, live in Colombia and Mexico and, since July 2024, Peru.

02 / Who uses itRegulars, not just first-time deposits

The customer is an adult player in a regulated market - someone spinning slots on a Tuesday night, betting a Sunday football slate, or grinding a poker session across state lines. The scale is national and then some: 15 US states, Ontario, and three Latin American countries. But the more telling detail is retention. Rush Street Interactive has been named EGR North America's Customer Services Operator of the Year five years running, from 2020 through 2024. In a market where every operator sells more or less the same games, service is one of the few things a company can actually own.

That focus shows up in the product's texture. Players accumulate bonus points that convert to cash, spin wheels and open scratch cards, and can chat inside a community feed - mechanics lifted straight from the casino-floor loyalty book and rebuilt for a phone. The design bet is that a player who feels recognized comes back on their own, which costs far less than paying to reacquire them. Over a full year, small differences in how often a player returns compound into the margins that separate RSI from operators still treating acquisition as the whole game.

03 / The problem it solvesMaking legal gambling feel like hospitality

The problem Rush Street Interactive set out to solve is not “how do people gamble” - that is settled - but how a regulated operator earns durable loyalty when the underlying product is a commodity and the rules change state by state. Its answer leans on the casino playbook: loyalty programs, cash-convertible bonus points, gamified promotions like wheel spins and scratch cards, community chat, and a customer-service operation it treats as a headline feature rather than a cost center. The company also positions responsible gaming as part of the answer, and became the first US-based online gaming and betting company to earn the Responsible Gambling Council's RG Check iGaming accreditation.

“Friendly, fun, and fair to all our valued players.” The company's stated brand promise

04 / How it's differentMargin discipline in a market addicted to spending

The clearest difference between Rush Street Interactive and the giants it competes with - DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars - is what it does with a marketing dollar. For years the industry's default move was to spend whatever it took to acquire a user and worry about profit later. RSI went the other way. In 2025 it cut adjusted sales-and-marketing expense to about 14% of revenue, down from roughly 17% the year before, and still grew. Adjusted EBITDA rose 66% to $153.7 million. For a company its size, competing against far better-funded rivals, that discipline is the strategy.

The other quiet differentiator is geography. While much of the US industry fought a trench war over domestic sportsbook share, RSI had already planted flags in Latin America. Being early in Colombia, Mexico and Peru gives it a second growth engine that most American rivals are only now considering, and it spreads regulatory risk across markets that mature on different clocks. When one state's rules tighten or a new tax lands, the damage is diluted rather than existential.

Owning the technology is the third leg. Because RSI built and runs its own platform rather than licensing a vendor's, it does not pay a cut of every bet to a third party and it decides what to build next. The poker network, the loyalty engine, the bonusing tools - all shipped on the company's own timeline. That control is invisible to the player but it is exactly what lets a mid-sized operator behave like a technology company instead of a reseller.

05 / Products & servicesOne platform, three ways to play

06 / Business modelWhere the money comes from

The model is straightforward business-to-consumer real-money gaming. Casino revenue comes from gross gaming revenue - the house edge across thousands of games. Sportsbook revenue is the betting margin left after paying winners and bonuses. Social and free-to-play gaming adds a smaller layer. Because RSI owns its platform outright rather than renting one, it keeps more of the economics as it scales and can ship its own features - loyalty engines, bonusing tools, poker liquidity - on its own timeline.

07 / Expertise & the peopleA CEO with 50 patents

Richard Schwartz, a co-founder, has been CEO since 2021, when Greg Carlin moved to vice chairman. Schwartz is a lawyer by training - Berkeley undergrad, UC Hastings law - and, more tellingly for this business, is listed as an inventor on more than 50 gaming patents. That patent trail is a decent proxy for the company's self-image: it competes on product engineering as much as on brand. The broader culture describes itself as “collaborators and free-thinkers” working in an entertainment business, with employee empowerment and professional growth as recurring themes across roughly 920 staff.

“Celebrate the Win.” Rush Street Interactive brand line

08 / Where it fitsThe profitable middleweight

In a market dominated by two giants and a handful of well-capitalized challengers, Rush Street Interactive has carved out a distinct spot: the operator that grows and makes money at the same time. It went public in December 2020 through a SPAC merger with dMY Technology Group, at an enterprise value near $1.78 billion - and unlike many of that era's blank-check deals, it grew into the valuation instead of collapsing under it. It now trades on the NYSE under the ticker RSI.

The recent moves fit the pattern of a company playing offense from a position of strength. In 2025 it signed poker icon Phil Hellmuth as a brand and content partner, locked the Chicago Bears into an exclusive multiyear BetRivers and Rivers Casino deal, expanded a content partnership with Inspired Entertainment across Latin America and Delaware, and launched its poker network. For 2026, management guided to revenue of $1.375 billion to $1.425 billion. The casino family that learned software is, so far, still counting the win.