Alexandre Tomic, Alea: “The beauty with emerging verticals is that they are infinite, as opposed to markets”
Shows & conferences - 14 October, 2026
Alea has moved beyond casino content aggregation and into sportsbook, and sees a much bigger opportunity in emerging verticals, Alexandre Tomic, Founder at Alea, told Focus Gaming News at SBC Summit Lisbon 2026.
Tomic said the company “should have done it before”, because sports is “the best acquisition tool for online casinos”. Alea partnered with sportsbook provider FIRST.bet, which he described as a young, “hungry” company with innovative products and a team that includes former SBTech staff. Many of Alea’s customers had been asking for a sportsbook, and it had nothing to offer them. Integrating one proved more challenging than expected, he said, because sportsbook data and APIs are “completely different” from casino content, but Alea had faced similar adaptation with live dealer and crash games.
That experience, he argued, points to a broader strategy. Emerging verticals such as sweepstakes, parimutuel slots, P2P skill games and live dealer are “infinite, as opposed to markets”, while geographies regulate and sometimes close. The Brazilian closure during SBC Lisbon, he said, “creates a problem of trust” for the industry, since operators invest heavily without knowing whether a market will stay open. Looking at new products that can address the same markets in different ways, “sometimes without a licence”, may be the better option, as DraftKings and FanDuel did with daily fantasy. Tomic said Alea may become “an aggregator of emerging verticals”.
He backed this with figures. According to Tomic, Alea’s sweepstakes GGR doubled between April and August, to around 25 million a month, now about a quarter of the company’s total. A new provider in this vertical can reach significant volumes within two months, he said, which is not possible in real-money gaming, where only a few providers do such numbers even after years. “It’s a real opportunity for new game studios,” he said.
Asked whether the sportsbook launch was timed to the World Cup, Tomic said FIRST.bet had pushed for the timing, but the integration had long been planned. He compared the new learning curve with live dealer, which took years to monetise until Alea understood branded tables and side bets, and said Alea’s C-level team visited FIRST.BET's office in Bulgaria for training on how to sell the product. At the time of the interview, he said, the company was “right at the beginning” of that curve and hoped it would be much shorter.