Optimove has signed an agreement to acquire Smartico, bringing together the two platforms that did more than any others to define CRM marketing in iGaming. The deal, announced on 6 April 2026, is expected to close in the coming weeks. Financial terms were not disclosed.
What the Deal Covers
Under the agreement, both companies will continue operating as fully independent businesses. Smartico retains its own brand, team, product roadmap, and market approach. The company’s founders remain in charge, with full decision-making authority over strategy and day-to-day operations. Existing clients are unaffected: same team, same pricing, same service model.
The two companies occupy distinct positions in the CRM stack. Optimove built its platform on data analytics and AI decisioning, enabling operators to segment and engage players through personalised, behaviour-driven campaigns. It has been at the forefront of AI-powered marketing since 2012 and counts 52% of EGR Power 50 operators among its clients, including 70% of the top ten. Smartico’s differentiation came from a different direction: it was first to bring gamification directly into the CRM workflow, turning player engagement into structured game loops through missions, rewards, and interactive mechanics rather than message-based campaigns.
Pini Yakuel, Founder and CEO of Optimove, said:
“What impressed us about Smartico is the combination of product strength, service excellence, and the way the company has been built. Like Optimove, they created a strong business that was bootstrapped. Smartico was the competitor that stood out, and that’s because they did something original: they were first to bring gamification and CRM marketing together as a compelling marketing advantage that iGaming operators adopted. The category now has two leading platforms. We built one and we’ve backed the other.”
Arman Gal, CEO and co-founder of Smartico, said:
“What makes this step especially meaningful for us is that Smartico remains fully independent, with the same leadership, the same team, and full control over our product strategy and roadmap. That allows us to keep moving forward as ourselves, while benefiting from greater strength and opportunity. This partnership gives us more firepower to scale faster, serve the market even better, and continue innovating in the player engagement space we helped shape.”
Intentional Competition
The structure of the deal is unusual by acquisition standards. Optimove has stated publicly that both companies will continue to compete in the market. Optimove will keep investing in Optimove Gamify, its own loyalty and gamification platform, while Smartico independently evolves its roadmap. The rationale given is that competition between the two drives better outcomes for operators than consolidation into a single product would.
That framing positions the acquisition less as a merger of capabilities and more as a portfolio play: Optimove gains financial exposure to the second most significant platform in the space while preserving the differentiation that made both valuable. Whether that independence holds as the companies grow closer operationally remains to be seen.
The Broader CRM Landscape
The iGaming CRM space has matured considerably over the past three years, and the Optimove-Smartico deal reflects a sector moving from growth mode into consolidation. Operators now face a market where the leading platforms have diverged sharply in their architectural approach, and the choice between them carries genuine strategic implications.
Fast Track has built its position around automation-first CRM with a natural language AI interface, targeting operators who want structured lifecycle management and journey orchestration without heavy technical overhead. The platform is enterprise-grade, with strong multi-brand capability and deep integration with iGaming-specific data models including real-time bet events, responsible gaming triggers, and bonus workflows. Its client base skews toward European operators with complex multi-brand structures.
Xtremepush has taken a different path, positioning itself as a unified customer data platform that combines CDP, CRM, omnichannel delivery, and a gamification layer in a single environment. The platform counts over 250 operators among its clients, including BetMGM and Betsson. Its pitch to operators is consolidation: fewer vendors, one data layer, real-time in-session intervention capability. Its XP Loyalty product competes directly with Smartico’s gamification offering.
The Optimove-Smartico acquisition tightens the top of the market. Operators evaluating CRM infrastructure now face a landscape where Optimove controls two of the established gamification-first and analytics-first approaches, while Fast Track and Xtremepush each represent different philosophies on how to build an engagement stack. The European market’s GGR of €123.4bn in 2024 and continued regulatory complexity in mature jurisdictions have made CRM performance a direct competitive differentiator, not an operational afterthought.
Market Context
The global online gambling market reached US$95.3bn in 2024 and is projected to reach US$185.17bn by 2033, according to the Online Gambling Market: Global Trends, Regulation and Forecast 2025-2033 report. Growth is coming from multiple directions simultaneously: Latin America, Africa, and Asia are adding scale, while European markets and a fragmented US landscape are adding complexity. For operators managing both, the sophistication of their CRM infrastructure increasingly determines how much of that growth they actually capture.
Optimove’s move to acquire Smartico signals that the platform believes the next competitive battleground in iGaming CRM is not feature breadth but market consolidation at the top tier. Owning the two most established gamification and analytics brands leaves less room for operators to build a competing stack without engaging with either company’s ecosystem. The transaction is expected to close within weeks, pending final terms.
Source: Optimove / GlobeNewswire
