Optimove to acquire Smartico. Optimove and Smartico to remain fully independent, each continuing to innovate and grow the iGaming CRM marketing industry. April 06, 2026 11:49 ET | Source: Optimove New York, April 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Optimove, the creator of Positionless Marketing and the #1 Player Engagement Solution for iGaming and sports betting operators, today announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Smartico, the company that brought gamification-led CRM marketing to the iGaming industry. The transaction is expected to close in the coming weeks. As part of the agreement, both Optimove and Smartico will continue to operate as fully independent businesses, each maintaining its own brand, team, product strategy, roadmap, and market approach. The Smartico founders will continue to lead the company, retaining full decision-making authority over strategy, product roadmap, and day-to-day operations. Terms of the deal were undisclosed. The acquisition comes at a time of sustained global growth in online gaming. According to the Online Gambling Market: Global Trends, Regulation & Forecast 2025-2033 report, the global online gambling market reached US$95.3 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach US$185.17 billion by 2033. At the same time, complexity is increasing across every major region - from maturing European markets navigating regulatory evolution, to a fragmented US landscape, to fast-growing regions across Latin America, Africa and Asia. For operators navigating this complexity, having genuine choice in CRM marketing platforms has never mattered more. Optimove blazed the trail in CRM marketing for iGaming, creating the category and building the market. Over time, Optimove watched peers enter the space. One stood out. Smartico was the company that brought gamification combined with CRM marketing to the iGaming industry - at the time a genuinely new product category - and built a strong, disciplined business around it. The acquisition brings together two of the leading platforms in the space, reinforcing Optimove's category leadership at a moment when the iGaming CRM market is transitioning from a growth phase to a more mature one. The two companies come from different roots. Optimove was built on data analytics, now using deep intelligence to power AI decisioning agents that help operators understand, segment, and engage their players with personalized messages. Smartico revolutionized CRM marketing by embedding gamification directly into the player journey, driving deeper, more rewarding engagement. Today, they are amplifying that approach by infusing custom-built generative AI into every corner of their product, unlocking next-level innovation across their suite. Together, they represent the two defining starting points in iGaming CRM. As independent companies, each will continue to innovate and drive the industry forward. "What impressed us about Smartico is the combination of product strength, service excellence, and the way the company has been built," said Pini Yakuel, Founder and CEO of Optimove. "Like Optimove, they created a strong business that was bootstrapped. What began as a hobby by four enthusiasts driven by the challenge of player retention quickly evolved into something very real. They made smart investments, built an excellent team, and delivered genuine value to clients. 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 & Co-Founder of Smartico, said: "We're proud to join forces with Optimove at such an important moment for the iGaming CRM industry. From the beginning, we built Smartico with a clear product vision, strong execution, and a deep commitment to creating real value for customers. We appreciate the trust that Pini and the Optimove team have placed in what we've built. "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." Independent Operation and Continued Competition Smartico will continue to operate as an independent business unit. Its founders will continue to lead the company's strategy, product roadmap, and day-to-day operations. Nothing changes for Smartico's clients: the same team, the same product, the same pricing, and the same service model. It now has the added strength of a well-resourced backer. Both companies will continue to invest in their respective platforms and compete in the market. For example, Optimove will continue to develop and strengthen Optimove Gamify, its own loyalty and gamification platform as it drives CRM marketing into the Positionless era. Smartico will continue to evolve its own product roadmap independently. This is intentional: both companies believe that competition drives innovation and produces better outcomes for iGaming operators. Leadership in iGaming CRM and AI As the pioneer of CRM marketing for iGaming, Optimove defined the category and continues to lead it. The company has been at the forefront of AI innovation in marketing since 2012, embedding AI directly into its platform and paving the way for the AI decisioning agents that now shape the industry. Today, its Positionless Marketing platform enables marketers to break free from the limitations of fixed roles by managing AI agents across marketing workflows with the goal of orchestrating highly personalized campaigns in real time and at scale. Positionless Marketing has been proven to improve campaign efficiency by 88%. This deal marks a seminal moment for the iGaming industry, proof that the category Optimove created is now one of the most dynamic and consequential marketing disciplines in the world. About Smartico Smartico pioneered gamification in the iGaming industry and became one of the companies that helped shape the modern player engagement category by combining gamification and CRM in a single platform. Its solutions help operators increase retention, loyalty, engagement, and player value through a powerful mix of real-time gamification and CRM capabilities. Founded as a bootstrapped business, Smartico has built a strong reputation for product excellence, disciplined execution, and service quality, with an impressive customer base across global iGaming markets. The company's portfolio includes Smartico and TheAffiliatePlatform.com. For more information, go to smartico.ai. About Optimove Optimove is the creator of Positionless Marketing and the #1 Player Engagement Solution for iGaming and sports betting operators. Positionless Marketing frees marketing teams from the limitations of fixed roles, giving every marketer the power to execute any marketing task instantly and independently. Positionless Marketing has been proven to improve campaign efficiency by 88%, allowing marketing teams to create more personalized engagement with existing customers. For two years running, Optimove has been positioned as a Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs, recognized for its AI-driven decisioning, prescriptive insights, and proven ability to orchestrate thousands of personalized campaigns in real time across channels. By embedding AI directly into its platform as early as 2012, Optimove paved the way for today's Positionless Marketing standard. Its Positionless Marketing Platform includes Optimove Engage and Orchestrate for cross-channel campaign decisioning and orchestration; Optimove Personalize, a digital personalization engine; and Optimove Gamify, a loyalty and gamification platform. Optimove provides industry-specific and use-case solutions for leading consumer brands globally.

Optimove announces new ai-powered capabilities to improve and accelerate the content lifecycle. GlobeNewswire | Optimove Today at 1:34pm PDT New York, March 31, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Optimove, the creator of Positionless Marketing, announced new AI agents and AI-powered capabilities that improve and accelerate the entire content lifecycle. The announcement reflects Optimove's continued investment in empowering marketers with the tools for content creation, quality assurance, and decisioning. Marketers can now move faster from idea to execution, with the confidence that every piece of content is on-brand, meets compliance requirements, and is delivered to the right customer. This announcement advances Positionless Marketing, which gives marketers three transformative powers: Data Power, Creative Power, and Optimization Power, enabling them to execute any task, instantly and independently. These new capabilities directly advance Creative Power. What once required a team of specialists and weeks of back and forth, ensuring content was on-brand, met compliance requirements, and reached the right customer, can now be done by any marketer, independently, without waiting. They also help meet the ultimate goal of customer retention marketing, to deliver timely, relevant messages at the speed of each customer's interaction with a brand. When content keeps pace with the consumer, engagement deepens, loyalty grows, and customer lifetime value compounds over time. While generative AI has dramatically accelerated content creation, marketing teams still struggle with key questions: * Can AI-generated content be trusted to stay on brand and compliant? * Which content actually works, and for whom? * How can marketers scale high-performing content without increasing manual work or operational complexity? As a result, marketers still spend significant time on approvals, QA checks, rework, and manual testing. Content is no longer hard to create - but it remains difficult to operationalize, optimize, and scale across channels with confidence. According to Shai Frank, SVP of Product and GM of the Americas of Optimove, "Generative AI has removed the barriers to content creation. The challenge our new AI agents and AI-powered capabilities overcome is ensuring every piece of content is on-brand, meets compliance requirements, and is continuously optimized based on what actually performs." The following capabilities work together across the content lifecycle: * Optimove AI Assistant - An advanced AI agent that works alongside marketers to create, validate, and optimize content through guided prompts * Template Creation Agent - An agent that creates new emails from natural language prompts by referencing existing pre-approved templates that ensure agent output is on brand, style, and voice * Content Studio - A centralized workspace where marketers create, edit, and manage campaign content across channels in one place * Global Brand Guidelines - Similar to other vibe-coding platforms such as Claude, brands can define tone of voice, brand values, localization rules, compliance requirements, and more to ensure AI-generated content consistently stays on brand * Content Advisor Agent - Evaluates generated content against brand guidelines and industry requirements, scoring content quality and identifying potential risks before activation * Content QA Agent - An AI agent built to automatically scan campaigns for errors, broken links, missing personalization, and compliance risks before content is sent to customers Decisioning * Content Decisioning Agent - Generates and A/B/n tests multiple content variations and dynamically delivers the best-performing variant to each customer based on real engagement metrics * Content Intelligence Agent - Delivers AI-powered content insights from every campaign by analyzing its content performance. The agent automatically identifies each message's tone of voice, promotion type, and product category, allowing marketers to discover what resonates with each customer and audience This announcement comes on the heels of Optimove's recently announced AI Decisioning Studio a single place where marketers can interact, monitor, and collaborate with their agentic marketing team. About Optimove Optimove, the creator of Positionless Marketing, frees marketing teams from the limitations of fixed roles, giving every marketer the power to execute any marketing task instantly and independently. Positionless Marketing has been proven to improve campaign efficiency by 88%, allowing marketing teams to create more personalized engagement with existing customers. For two years running, Optimove has been positioned as a Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs, recognized for its AI-driven decisioning, prescriptive insights, and proven ability to orchestrate thousands of personalized campaigns in real time across channels. AI-led marketing is a hallmark of Optimove's visionary leadership. By embedding AI directly into its platform as early as 2012, Optimove paved the way for today's Positionless Marketing standard. Its Positionless Marketing Platform includes Optimove Engage and Orchestrate for cross-channel campaign decisioning and orchestration; Optimove Personalize, a digital personalization engine; and Optimove Gamify, a loyalty and gamification platform. Today, its comprehensive AI-powered suite is at the leading edge of empowering marketers to streamline workflows from Insight to Creation and through Optimization. Optimove provides industry-specific and use-case solutions for leading consumer brands globally. Olivia Arruda Optimove 8585881053 [email protected] This is a paid placement. For further inquiries, please contact GlobeNewswire directly.

Optimove wins Innovation of the Year award at the European iGaming Awards with Positionless Marketing. 12 de February de 2026 Optimove, creator of the Positionless Marketing concept and the #1 solution for player engagement in iGaming, won the Innovation of the Year 2025 award at the European iGaming Awards, held during ICE 2026 in Barcelona. The platform stood out for simplifying marketing execution in the sector, reducing operational bottlenecks in the day-to-day work of the teams. How does the European iGaming Awards prize system work? The European iGaming Awards recognize initiatives that drive significant advancements across the online gaming industry. The Innovation of the Year category rewards solutions with concrete and scalable impact. Optimove was chosen for challenging the traditional marketing model based on rigid roles and replacing it with a unified, AI-driven approach that allows marketers to operate with more autonomy, without relying on technical teams or slow creative processes. Optimove's Positionless Marketing platform approach. This approach is made possible by Optimove's Positionless Marketing Platform, structured around three main capabilities: * The power of data: it allows marketing professionals to access insights and define customer segments immediately, enabling hyper-personalization without relying on engineers or analysts. * Creative power: it enables the instant creation of ready-to-use materials for different channels, such as texts and visual elements, reducing dependence on traditional creative production cycles. * Optimization power: ensures continuous campaign optimization through automated journeys and real-time testing, eliminating the need for manual analysis or lengthy approval processes. By breaking free from the limitations imposed by fixed roles, Positionless Marketing gives marketing professionals the autonomy to perform any task quickly and independently. In practice, this approach has already proven to increase campaign efficiency by 88%, in addition to enabling more relevant and personalized experiences throughout the customer journey. Pini Yakuel, founder and CEO of Optimove, states: "Most marketing teams still function like an assembly line, where ideas go through several stages before reaching execution. Positionless Marketing eliminates these handoffs and allows professionals to work from start to finish." How Optimove accelerates iGaming campaigns and expands its platform with ai-based solutions. In iGaming, the impacts are clear. FDJ United reduced campaign execution time from six weeks to just one day, while Caesars shortened that process from five days to five minutes. The award follows recent announcements by the company, such as AI Content Decisioning, an OptiGenie AI agent that creates, tests, and optimizes marketing messages in real time, and Optimove Loyalty, a solution developed to reduce reliance on bonuses through personalized and gamified engagement strategies. The new features expand the Positionless Marketing Platform and reinforce Optimove's focus on accelerating marketing execution with greater autonomy. By redefining how marketing teams operate on a daily basis, Optimove not only advances industry technology but also sets a new standard for marketing execution in iGaming. About Optimove. Optimove is the creator of the Positionless Marketing concept and the #1 player engagement solution for iGaming and sports betting operators. Positionless Marketing frees marketing teams from the limitations of fixed roles, giving each professional the power to execute any marketing task instantly and independently. This approach has been proven to increase campaign efficiency by 88%, allowing teams to create more personalized and relevant experiences for their customers. For the second consecutive year, Optimove has been recognized as a Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs, thanks to its AI-driven decision-making capabilities, prescriptive insights, and proven ability to orchestrate thousands of personalized campaigns in real time across multiple channels. AI-driven marketing is a hallmark of the company's visionary leadership. By incorporating artificial intelligence into its platform as early as 2012, Optimove paved the way for the current standard of Positionless Marketing. Their platform includes Engage and Orchestrate, for decision-making and orchestration of multichannel campaigns; Optimove Personalize, a digital personalization engine; and Optimove Gamify, a loyalty and gamification solution. Currently, its comprehensive suite of AI-powered solutions is at the forefront of marketing transformation, enabling professionals to optimize their workflows from insight to creation and optimization. Optimove offers industry-specific and use-case-specific solutions for major global consumer brands.