EIG Berlin Notes – Venture Financing for iGaming

Session Overview – Day 1 Expert Panel on venture financing for technology and new business sheds insight on the complexities of raising capital for igaming enterprises. Panel discuss investment criteria’s that need to be matched by igaming businesses looking for funding, and how to make your enterprise or business proposition attractive to VC financing.

Panel – David Shapton Akur Capital, Dawid Myslinski Redeye, Jens-Philipp Klein of Atlantic Internet

• David Shapton of Akur Capital – has told EIG delegates looking for potential investment that they would need to target the potential investors carefully, as only a select few are interesting in funding companies in the gambling industry.Many potential investors will only invest in an already profitable business, he said, but if they were to get in any earlier then the firm would need to have the potential to be a game changer, something that the incumbents were not already doing or were unable to do.

• Dawid Myslinski of Redeye said that another key factor for his firm when looking to back start-ups was the people behind the company seeking funding. He suggested that investors look for people with a proven track record of entrepreneurship with other successful ventures already in the bag. He conceded that this wasn’t particularly helpful for first time entrepreneurs, but added that if people have already managed to attract funding from friends and family as well as some seed investment then that at least showed they could pass the first test.

• Dawid Myslinski  further suggests that investment via crowd funding was not usually the best test of a company’s success given that the crowd by its nature doesn’t scrutinise business propositions as closely as VC investors. Shapton even suggested that companies would not get the type of support and expertise from crowd funding than they would with larger investors.

• Jens-Philipp Klein of Berlin-based Atlantic Internet said they only funded start-ups in the local area, where they can keep in close communication with their companies. He also added that the team at the company is the most important factor, and the more disruptive the technology the better. He added that KPIs in the early stages of funding were not important but the firm encouraged its companies to develop the product to get to market as quickly as possible in order to obtain feedback and refine the product that way.