igaming
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Jennifer Weissman Bets on the Thrill, Not the Jackpot
The CMO of PENN Entertainment has spent a career learning what actually pulls people back to the casino floor - and the app - and it is not what most people assume.
Caesars Is a Loyalty Machine Dressed Like a Casino Empire
The marble, neon and sportsbooks get the attention. The real engine is Caesars Rewards - a shared currency designed to turn a weekend guest into a customer everywhere Caesars operates.
Rush Street Interactive
The Chicago operator behind BetRivers turned a casino-floor pedigree into a $1.1 billion online betting business - and it did it while most of its rivals were still burning cash to buy customers.
AGS - American Gaming Systems
The Las Vegas machine-maker spent two decades climbing from tribal bingo halls to the main casino floor. Now private again and freshly rebranded around a lightning bolt, AGS is betting its next act on cabinets, table games, and the screen in your pocket.
DoubleDown Interactive
The Seattle-born social casino pioneer has spent 16 years selling the feeling of a casino without a cash-out. Its next wager is less visible but more consequential: own more of the checkout, broaden into Europe and make an old hit travel further.
PENN Entertainment, Inc.
How a family racetrack in Grantville, Pennsylvania grew into a 43-property casino operator - and why it just walked away from ESPN to bet on its own brand.
Optimove
The Israeli-born CRM marketing company spent a decade teaching brands to talk to customers one at a time. Now it wants to dissolve the marketing org chart entirely.
Anne Hay
Anne Hay is EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at PayNearMe, a fintech company focused on frictionless bill payment and money movement. A journalist by training, she has spent more than two decades in B2B SaaS marketing, including 16 years in payments technology, building brand recognition and consumer research programs across bill pay, lending, iGaming and online sports betting. She was named to the 2023 FINITE Influential 30.
ZOOT
ZOOT is a New York-based sweepstakes gaming platform that brings video-game sensibilities to iGaming. Instead of slots and table games, it builds proprietary arcade titles - Crash, Plinko, Mines, Dice and sports-themed variants - playable free with Gold Coins or, via a sweepstakes model, with Sweeps Coins that can be redeemed for cash prizes. Founded by gaming veterans Sean Ryan (ex-Facebook games, OpenWager) and John Cahill (ex-Sega, Yahoo Games), ZOOT raised a $6M seed in June 2025 led by CoinFund with Griffin Gaming Partners, aiming to fold stablecoin payments into gaming and expand from the U.S. to markets across Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Sean Ryan
Sean Ryan is the CEO and co-founder of ZOOT (GetZoot), a New York-based social sweepstakes gaming platform that swaps casino slots for arcade-style games like Plinko, Mines, Crash and Dice played for cash prizes. A 30-year gaming and digital-media operator, he built and led Facebook's multi-billion-dollar games business for 11 years, ran the digital music service Listen.com/Rhapsody, and co-founded social casino studio Open Wager (maker of LuckyLand Slots), which sold to VGW in 2017. In June 2025 he raised $6 million in seed funding led by CoinFund with Griffin Gaming Partners to turn ZOOT's US sweepstakes business into a global, stablecoin-powered gaming network.
Incognia
Incognia is a location identity and fraud prevention company that uses device intelligence, location behavioral analytics, and AI to help platform businesses — from food delivery to financial services — detect fraud without compromising the user experience. By processing signals from GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth without capturing PII, Incognia identifies legitimate users from fraudsters across multiple devices with 99.999999% accuracy, a 0.0001% false-positive rate, and no friction for genuine users. Deployed on over 200 million smartphones and protecting nearly 1 billion devices, Incognia has become the go-to fraud layer for platforms like Grubhub, Delivery Hero, and Upwork.
Danny Shader
Danny Shader is the founder and CEO of PayNearMe, a Santa Clara-based fintech platform that processes over $50 billion annually for more than 20,000 businesses. A serial entrepreneur whose previous ventures were acquired by Amazon, Motorola, and Netscape, Shader built PayNearMe from a niche cash-payment network into PayXM, the industry's first full-stack Payment Experience Management platform. Backed by $245 million in total funding including a $50M Series E in September 2025, he has spent 15+ years turning a deceptively simple problem - helping the cash-dependent and underbanked pay their bills - into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise payments category.