What is the background of OPTX?
OPTX was founded in 2019 and we are now about two years old. My co-CEO and I, founded a company on the premise that we wanted to create a technology platform that really blocked and tackled the day-to-day challenges that operators face in marketing, slots and player development. We wanted to position this product for what we knew lay in the future. There are no shortage of new data sources coming online for casino operators; think sportsbook, think online gaming, think social gaming. These operators are going to need a product that takes all of that data – everything that’s happening within their four walls and everything that’s happening outside of their four walls – make sense of it and take action on it. And so, that’s exactly what OPTX does.
I mean, that’s one of the foundations of our product: Helping brick-and-mortar casinos figure out how to take in all of the information from what is happening outside the building.
How can a bridge be created between brick-and-mortar, iGaming, racing, and sports betting. And then how can that information be gleaned for insight into attributes about players, attributes about machines, and then turn that into an automation of campaigns and one-to-one marketing. That’s what everyone’s striving for. A tool like OPTX allows you to collect massive amounts of data and make sense of it.
We connect directly to all of the different systems that exist in a casino or through third party systems, like online gaming, and we pull all of that information into a single essential data warehouse. From there we do all of our transformations, all of our queries, all of our analytics, AI models, ML models. Then we turn it into what is you see as the end user, OPTX.
What has the response from clients been to your technology?
There are two sides to this answer. The first side that I want to mention is something that we hear all the time, which is: 'I cannot believe how great your customer service is.' Operators are not used to picking up the phone on a Friday night and recording an issue, a challenge, or having questions, and the vendor gets an answer right away. We have committed as a company to being a true partner with our customers. That means we are working days, nights and weekends because casinos are a 24/7 business.
What is OPTX biggest challenge?
Our biggest challenge is constantly recruiting, and I think everybody, regardless of their industry, you know we face those same challenges, especially with a technology company. We’re a fast-growing company, and we are always out there looking to hire the absolute best resources; fast-growing companies need fast growing teams.
Are you enjoying visiting G2E in person?
Yes. Zoom fatigue is real. Being here at G2E has given us an opportunity to meet some people we’ve been talking to for a while now, in person, for the first time. It gives us the opportunity to show them the new features that we’ve implemented since they last saw the product. It’s also gives us an opportunity to meet so many new connections and find many new opportunities to really help solve the challenges facing operators. This show has far exceeded our expectations in terms of turnout and in terms of decision makers that are here looking for new technology. We are looking to help solve their problems through technology. That’s what we’re here to do.
What is OPTX’s approach to fundraising?
We are privately funded, and currently today we are not seeking additional funds needed to scale.
What is next for OPTX?
We want to grow the scale of the product and scale of our customers. So, we’ve got an incredible pipeline of partners, new customers coming online that are so excited to use our product and see what the impact on their business will be. It’s going to be amazing, but I’m also super excited for the product development. We’ve got an incredible data science team that’s doing groundbreaking things on the artificial intelligence side, whether it’s making predictions and recommendations around very specific players, or making predictions and recommendations on slot performance and optimization. I think that you’re going to see what is already a best-in-class product in the market excel in the next six to 12 months to far beyond anything that people have yet seen.
