Most platform companies spend surplus capital on acquisitions or keep it in-house. Soft2Bet took a different route: a dedicated investment fund that puts the group’s capital and operating expertise behind other entrepreneurs. Soft2Bet Invest is that vehicle, and its structure reflects how the group views the future of the industry.
The July 2024 Launch of Soft2Bet Invest
The vehicle arrived with a defined mandate rather than a vague ambition. Three dated facts anchor it, in the order they happened:
July 2024: the fund opens with €50 million in committed capital, described as an iGaming Innovation Fund.
September 2024: SiGMA East Europe presents the vehicle with Outstanding Contribution to Gaming 2024.
From late 2024 onward: backing proceeds across the two declared sectors, iGaming and casual gaming.
A dated record matters in an industry where investment announcements often outrun investment activity. Soft2Bet put the scope, the size and the sectors on the table at the start, which lets any founder judge fit before the first conversation. The launch also came from a position of operating strength rather than diversification anxiety: by July 2024, Soft2Bet was already running consumer brands and supplying operator clients at scale.
The vehicle also matches the priorities Uri Poliavich has kept on record since founding the company in 2016: innovation resourced with capital rather than stated as intent. The mandate has not drifted since, and the sequence stayed clean: capital first, recognition second, deployment third.
Capital Paired With Operating Help
Money is the smaller half of the offer. Soft2Bet Invest backs entrepreneurs and companies, and what travels with the cheque is the operating group’s accumulated practice:
from technology that Soft2Bet built and still maintains itself
gathered across 23 licences and 12 regulated jurisdictions
grounded in consumer brands that run in production every day
what actually ships, sells, and retains in regulated iGaming.
For an early-stage team, that second half is the difference between advice and information. Plenty of investors can describe the industry from the outside. An established group working within the industry can answer the narrower, harder questions a startup actually faces — and Soft2Bet has dedicated teams doing exactly that every day. The list is short on purpose: Soft2Bet Invest offers what the group can genuinely deliver from its own operations.
What Does a Startup Actually Receive?
The path from introduction to support runs in a consistent order, and each stage has a clear owner:
| Stage | What Happens | Who Owns It |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | A startup presents its product and its market thesis | The founding team |
| Assessment | Fit is weighed against the declared sectors and the group’s expertise | Soft2Bet Invest |
| Investment | Capital is committed from the €50 million pool | Soft2Bet Invest |
| Operating support | Product, licensing and market questions draw on group experience | Soft2Bet specialist teams |
The last stage is the one conventional capital cannot copy. A portfolio company gets its questions answered by people who solve the same problems commercially, not by advisers reasoning from a slide deck, and the answers come with the context of decisions Soft2Bet has already paid for in production.
The Fund’s Place Inside the Group
Soft2Bet Invest is a separate vehicle with a separate purpose, and the boundary is worth stating plainly. The fund is not a discount programme attached to platform contracts, and taking its capital is not the same thing as licensing the group’s technology. Startups keep building their own products; Soft2Bet keeps operating its own.
What the two share is judgment. The same experience that guides Soft2Bet’s product decisions guides the fund’s assessments, so a startup gets evaluated by criteria formed in live operation rather than in a spreadsheet. That connection, rather than any contractual tie, is what makes the vehicle a group asset instead of a side project.
Where the €50 Million Goes
The €50 million is committed capital with a sector-specific mandate, which makes it an unusual pool. General technology money spreads across whatever looks promising; this allocation stays inside the ground Soft2Bet knows from operating experience. Concentration is the point. A fund that understands its narrow field deeply can price risk that generalists have to guess at. Committed capital also signals patience: a pool set aside in advance does not need raising deal by deal, so Soft2Bet Invest can hold its criteria steady instead of chasing whatever a fundraising cycle happens to favour.
The figure is also the only financial number attached to the vehicle, and the discipline is deliberate. Founders hear the size of the pool and the sectors in scope, and everything after that is a conversation about the specific company rather than a public prospectus. For a startup, that discretion cuts both ways and both ways favour it: terms stay private, and attention stays on the product.
SiGMA Recognition for Soft2Bet Invest
Outstanding Contribution to Gaming 2024 arrived at SiGMA East Europe in September 2024, roughly 2 months after the fund opened. The award is a statement about Soft2Bet’s reputation among industry peers at the moment it chose to become an investor.
A founder weighing the fund can treat the title as third-party confirmation that the group entered this role visibly and credibly, with the sector watching and the recognition on record within a single quarter.
Sector Knowledge as the Differentiator
A conventional financial investor brings capital, discipline, and a network. What it usually cannot bring is a working answer to operational questions: how a verification flow behaves under a real licence, what an authority checks in the first months, why a feature that demos well underperforms with real players. Soft 2 Bet teams handle these questions as daily work, and the fund routes that experience straight to its portfolio.
The practical test is simple. When a startup’s roadmap collides with a regulated-market detail, a generalist investor schedules a call with an external consultant, while this fund walks down the hall. Speed of good answers compounds over a company’s early years, and it is the quietest advantage Soft2Bet Invest offers.
The Two Target Sectors
The mandate names iGaming and casual gaming, and the pairing is more coherent than it first looks. iGaming covers regulated real-money products: wagering, casino content, and the infrastructure around them. Casual gaming covers entertainment titles without wagering, where engagement mechanics, progression systems, and session design decide success.
The overlap is the craft of keeping players genuinely engaged, which is the home ground of Soft2Bet’s own engagement work. A startup in either sector lands with a backer that has shipped retention products commercially and measured the results.