Great. Good afternoon. T hanks, everyone, for joining us. My name is Bernie McTernan. I am one of the internet analysts here at Needham & Company, and my pleasure to share the stage again with Rush Street. We have CEO Richard Schwartz and CFO and President Kyle Sauers. Thank you both for joining us once again.
Thanks for having us. Nice to see you again, Bernie.
Great. Maybe just to start, we'd love to just get maybe a sense of the trends that we've seen in your business over the past year or even two years have been quite remarkable and lots of growth in terms of customers. But if you were to kind of look back over the past year, what were some of the particular strengths that drove those results for the company, in your view?
I think it's really just been a focus on the things that deliver the best results for our company. We recognize that when it comes to the casino market, we really do have a premier experience to offer the customers and really target that audience very well, and so we've been doubling and tripling down on making sure we focus on those markets and improve every aspect of our company, from the development organization to the marketing and the operations. You can't have a weak link anywhere and expect to compete as successfully as we have, and you've seen that we've been able to grow market share in the casino markets with that focus and the ability to really execute in a way that we know we're uniquely able to do, which is because we have our own technology and we know how to build our own experiences.
We're not just publishing third-party products, but we're actually building our own. And when you build your own, the goal is to be better and different. And we think we're able to do that. And we have an international business too that, as you know, has grown extremely well and growing everywhere extremely well, whether it's sports, casino, poker, Latin America, North America. Everything's just working right now and we're on all cylinders.
Yeah, no, agreed, and I know you guys are more casino-focused, but given NFL playoffs, I'll have to ask just how this NFL season went for you guys so far?
Yeah, so I think many of the operators talked about October maybe being a little bit tougher. But I think if you look at the state data that's come out and even the weekly data, November and December have been much better results for football. We actually enjoy a little bit of a different mix or broader mix towards soccer and tennis as well, particularly given our LatAm focus also. So we've got a little more diversification in that base, but I think it's been better house results this quarter than we all talked about in Q3.
Yeah, certainly post-earnings, it seems like things turned a corner there. How's the competitive environment in the industry right now?
You want me to take that, Richard?
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, I think obviously most of our focus is on what we can do better. I think the competitive environment has continued to get more rational over time. Everybody has their moments where they're pushing a little bit harder on advertising or bonusing. And certainly, we've had competitors talk about putting more effort into online casino, given the value of that and the value of players in online casino. I think while others have been saying that, we've had new records across the board. In Q3, you were talking about some of the strengths we've had, but Q3, we grew our monthly active users 34% in North America. But if you just isolate it to online casino markets, it was up 46%, which was the fastest year-over-year growth we'd had in four years.
And we hit first-time depositor records again in Q3, which was actually up 10% over the prior year or prior quarter, I should say, which was a record. So our marketing team is doing a great job filling the top of the funnel, bringing in new players. And that's all in the absence of any new market launches. So usually that sort of growth comes with big new market launches, but we've just been doing it through execution.
Right. And as we think about the competitive environment, usually we're talking about operators entering the landscape, but we're seeing one drop out with ESPN BET. Is that impacting the market at all?
I don't think we've seen any dramatic impact there. It wasn't a large share. I'm sure there's some shifting of media assets that's happening, but I wouldn't suggest that it's had any meaningful change either way on our business just yet.
Okay, understood.
I'm going to just add one thing about when you talk about competitive environments. I was almost thinking in my head when you asked that question that really where it's competitive right now is in prediction markets, right? Everyone's shifting their focus. That's a highly competitive market right now where we have 10-12 companies all believing they deserve a podium position, going at it aggressively. And most of that investment is going outside of the markets where we're operating in, even among some of our competitors who are sports-first brands that are trying to compete in that area. So I do think that's a positive from that. That focus is sort of elsewhere right now.
Certainly for us, we are staying very focused on what we know is a very strong ROI opportunity, which is to continue to focus on our casino growth, which is what Kyle pointed out, that incredible growth we experienced in the past year and continuing to feel that we're in the right path to continue that moving ahead.
Right. Well, I think we hit the over by waiting five minutes again to prediction markets. I mean, we can keep that.
That's a record right now for five minutes.
I want to point out that Richard took us there, not you, Bernie.
I know. Well, yeah, I mean, he might have seen the question list, but. But so I mean, the basic question, and I think everyone's come out and said the same thing, but just wanted to make sure we asked. Just are you seeing any impact from prediction markets in the states that you operate in?
We're not. The success of the prediction markets is really focused on those markets that don't have legal sports betting and have really robust products in those markets that are a far better experience for players. And I think that's where, as long as prediction markets are sticking around, that's where it's going to impact. And it's not. New OSB-only markets are not our top priority, as we've made pretty clear. So it's really not impacting our future growth or any of the current markets that we're in in any meaningful way.
Right. And I guess with that being said, and I'm sure you don't want to dive too much into one particular state, but I do think Delaware is interesting just because it's exclusive. So it's kind of ripe for competition, let's say. Is there any impact there versus other states, or really you're just not seeing any impact across the board?
No, it's a fair question. I think we've got a fantastic product, a sports product, and that's true in Delaware as well. I think I'd probably just point you back to the state data in Delaware. We're in our third year there now, and the numbers that have been out for October and November had GGR up over 50%. So really strong results there. So I don't think it's a negative for us.
Right. Did you guys think about launching, or I guess you could still do it, but was there any thought, or is there any thought of launching your own prediction market service?
So we're always monitoring it. We certainly have been following it from the very beginning. We are aware of every company in the space, every deal that was done, where things that we had looked at and considered. And we're at the moment in time where we're watching and monitoring the response from the state regulators. We're watching the response from the court outcomes. And as I said, if we were to do something, certainly it would be very thoughtful and after taking a lot of factors into consideration. And we certainly don't have a need or a passion to go drive a national sports market predictions product with our brands. I think you talk about aggression. Kalshi is everywhere. Polymarket is everywhere. The others are coming and will be everywhere.
And a lot of them are focusing on national advertising because you can reach almost every state through the way it's being run today. And so you may start to have to geolocate some states. Nevada was geolocated out for one of the states so far, but others may be added to that list. But you'll still get most of the national footprint, which means that all those ads and marketers focusing on those assets, prediction market operators, are really focusing on national marketing deals, not driving up the inventory or the cost for us where we do it much more locally. So we're not even seeing that impact ourselves. So to back to your question, we're monitoring it and we'll continue to monitor it in the future.
Right. I mean, you can't turn on CNBC either without the host referencing something and the Kalshi as a percentage or just the commercials as well. Now we've seen them turn on as well.
You see, the Wall Street Journal has been doing a partnership. I saw the Golden Globes had it, Polymarket all over on Sunday. So it's definitely a very heavy spend. But before this, it was crypto. Before that, it was NFTs. And you've seen the trend over the years. It was always something that's very, very exciting for a lot of the investors, and you get a lot of money poured in there. And very rarely do you end up having it be a really highly profitable category. And certainly, you're not going to have 12 winners in this category because of some limitations. But so I think we're sort of keeping, like I said, monitoring it. And if we were to ever do anything, obviously we'd have to be very thoughtful how we would do it and be very strategic.
Right. Well, acknowledging there's no crystal ball, how do you think this all plays out in the next 12-18 months?
I think prediction market operators are going to try to push the limits, especially because there's not a lot of enforcement right now, and they're self-certifying a lot of their markets, right? I think they're going to continue. Some will be more aggressive than others. As I said, it's very crowded. There's a lot of competition there. There are going to be a lot of opposition stakeholders there. Just this Monday, we had a letter. I've never really seen a public statement combining the American Gaming Association representing the commercial interests of casino groups and the tribal organization running a joint letter together, essentially urging Congress to act, right? That's something that you're going to see a lot of stakeholders try to limit the pushing of the prediction markets. You have the regulators have a role to play as a stakeholder.
The courts are going to have lots of outcomes across the states. Eventually, we'll get to the circuit courts, and I think the Supreme Court likely. Congress could have a role to play here as well in sort of clarifying the intents of the CFTC's legislation enabling this type of category. So I think you're going to have a lot of these stakeholders are going to be trying to impose limits. So for us, ultimately, I think the reaction is going to be legislation happens sooner for our categories because states are at risk of losing those very significant tax flows from state taxes, especially if over time you grow this in a category where it eventually diminishes sports, which we haven't seen. But certainly, there's pressure. You're already seeing some states are reacting who were on the fence before.
Okay, well, we might as well join rather than just watch all of our opportunities and be taken away by sort of a national brand operating outside the state framework that's existed in the history of gaming in this country. So I do think you're going to see a lot of legalization. And I think iCasino is shielded a whole lot more than sports is from this because, as you remember, the definition is supposed to be followed for these prediction markets are economic interests. And there are some arguments that can be made for sports why they are economic interests where you can't make the same arguments for casino in the same way as effectively.
So I do think that for a core market, there might be ways that people try to create loopholes, et cetera, but I think it's going to be a stretch, a bigger stretch and a more challenging hurdle in that way. So ultimately, I do think that it's going to shield the casino revenues and lead to an acceleration of iCasino legalization. You did see a couple of bills coming forward relatively recently, and so that would be a welcome development for us.
Yeah, no, I'm completely on board with that line of thinking. I mean, in our, not to plug our own research, but in our 2026 preview note, we thought legalization in OSB and probably iGaming as well would be a major theme of this year just because you have some of the largest companies in the space really doing a lot of the heavy lifting to show that sports betting is legal nationwide now. The state legislators are no longer choosing, can their constituents bet on sports or not? It's legal now. It's just about if they want the taxes.
It's already there. Everyone's like, you might as well add responsible gaming. You might as well add taxes. You might as well manage the underage problem that could exist when you're having players playing at younger ages than typically 21 that there is for regulated sports betting. So I do think there's a recognition that you're not deciding whether to legalize it or not. You're already deciding whether your state's going to participate in that process to protect your consumers and generate tax revenues for your state. So I think an easier discussion.
Right. Any states in particular we should be watching?
Sure. I think you saw this last week. New York and Virginia are two states that introduced iGaming legalization. I think those are really large population states, and either one would represent a major opportunity for our company and the rest of the industry. So I think as other states are showing greater interest because they're left alone more by the federal government and they have to find new sources of revenue, you're going to find more financial pressure on the states that we've seen in the last decade. And that could lead to an acceleration in this opportunity for states. Indiana is considering it. Maryland is another state that often hasn't been involved and does some studies authorized by the state to move things ahead. And as you know, we're planning ourselves for a launch this year in Alberta.
So we do have a nice jurisdiction opening up for us for iCasino later this year. And the regulations on that jurisdiction just were published two days ago and yesterday. So we have a much more clear understanding of what that's going to require. And things are moving along nicely in that jurisdiction for a launch later this year.
Okay. What will it mean? What's the opportunity? What's the process here to make sure you secure one of the four licenses or two remaining licenses?
Yeah, so we certainly make sense for us to be there, and it would make sense for a tribe to want us to be their partner because we have really the best yielding revenue-generating casino product in the industry. We have the product we've proven ourselves working with partners very effectively to grow a nice market share, and we have a poker platform, for example, that most others don't have, and poker is part of the cross-sell, and that's a unique element as well. So we have a lot of really great reasons why we should have an opportunity in those markets, and we'll work with the tribes that are interested to find if there's a commercially viable opportunity for us to jointly help each other out by delivering the best results that are possible in this industry in the casino category, so it plays to our strength, really.
And we have a great history of being successful working with other tribal partners. We didn't oppose the effort to legalize, et cetera. So I think we have a lot of things going for us.
Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How do the midterm elections play into this at all? Would we be less likely to hear either OSB or iGaming legislation because of that, or is it a non-issue in your view?
I think it's actually more likely, and the reason why is the one big beautiful bill introduced a lot of risk to state budgets. As you might know, they pushed back a lot of the costs of the states until after the midterm elections on purpose, really, to try to get the elections without that having a negative impact on the political election cycle, so what this means, especially, is that Medicaid, several of the states, including the ones I referenced earlier, like New York and Illinois included, actually, as another opportunity. Both those states really went very aggressive with the federal government matching on Medicaid, and those Medicaid matching dollars are going to be pulled back, which means there's going to be a shortage, a very substantial shortage.
If you look at a state like Michigan where iCasino is legal, they will have generated over $2 billion of taxes as of the end of this year, end of last year, since they've opened over the five-year period. So that's a very meaningful amount. Billions we're talking about opportunity. So I do think that when a government is looking for a way to make up a deficit in the budget that's been created by some of the impact of the federal bill, they're going to sit right back here and say, iCasino is a perfect way to slot in here and generate a huge amount of tax base in a proven reliable way than most other types of taxes that won't have the same level of volume and reliability to deliver those results.
So I do think that stress for states to find additional resources is going to be a benefit for us. And it's one of the very few things that are more proven and effective than iCasino to deliver that result for them.
Right. And then can you touch on briefly, as we're talking about more states opening up, can you talk about the decision not to enter Missouri?
Yeah, I can touch on it. We have not been shy about the fact that we're focusing more on iCasino in North America. That's where most of our investments are going from a marketing perspective. It's where we have an advantage with product for sure, as Richard was talking about before. So really for us, when we're looking at new markets, it's going to come down to new OSB markets. It's going to come down to tax rate, number of competitors, and what we think the likelihood of iCasino being launched there in the near term might be, which means if we see some movement in a state that doesn't have iCasino today and we're not in there for sports, we may revisit that. But at this time, it felt like Missouri wasn't the right time for us.
Right. Okay. You mentioned taxes, state taxes. I mean, last year was an avalanche in terms of what happened with online sports betting and the amount of states that increased the tax rates. Any thoughts on, will that be the anomaly? Do you think we'll get more tax hikes this year? How should investors think about this?
That's being iCasino-focused. We focus most attention on those jurisdictions because that would have the biggest impact on us. We're not hearing any chatter on this topic in those states or jurisdictions, especially I think because the casino markets where we operate are already high or have already raised the taxes. There's not a lot of room to move without severely impacting those taxes, the ability for states to generate those taxes. But we've seen in other European markets where you raise the taxes too high. In some cases recently, the Netherlands raised taxes and the government collected less money from the industry as a result because it did truly open up the black market. So I think we feel pretty comfortable where we are in the casino markets that we're in, the meaningful markets especially.
Colombia was the one that was a big topic for us this past year. I'm sure we'll talk about that soon. But I think for the rest of our jurisdictions, we feel pretty good about where we are. We aren't hearing anything about any tax raises that would impact us.
Okay. Well, yeah, let's hit that segue and talk about Colombia taxes. I know we got some news, I believe it was very late last year, but just update us on the latest on the situation.
Sure. So maybe just a quick reminder for those who hadn't followed us closely. During about 10 months of 2025, there was a temporary tax in place from an emergency tax decree by the president of Colombia that instituted a 19% tax on deposits. That tax was on players. So our approach to that, to make it right for players and consistent with our big competitors, was to bonus back that tax that players were being hit with. So we were bonusing. And probably the punitive part of that tax is that in our industry, both in Colombia and in North America, deposits and withdrawals will cycle through several times to generate the revenue. So that tax was a bit of a multiplier. As expected, that tax went away at the end of the year.
As you pointed out, the Colombian president was not able to get his tax reform through during the fourth quarter. Legislatively, he announced an economic emergency and issued some new tax decrees. The new tax decree on our industry is, again, 19%, but it's 19% of revenue after bonusing, so roughly on our revenue. So it's effectively raising the gaming tax rate by 19% temporarily here. It'll be reviewed by the Constitutional Court whether it's legal or not. There's an election coming up in the summer, so that may have an impact on the longevity of it.
But the outcome is that, because all of that bonusing goes away, we'll have a pretty meaningful lift in our revenue and also an improvement in profitability because this tax rate isn't or this tax isn't as punitive as the old tax, but not to the same extent as the revenue bounces back. So a much, much better situation for us than we were in 2025, but not quite as good as if the tax had gone away entirely. Anything I missed on that, Richard, that you thought I should add?
No, I think you covered it well. Yeah, and when does it go into place?
It went into place on January 1st, so the deposit tax and all of that excessive bonusing that we were doing went away at 12:01 A.M. on January 1st, and the new tax rate went into effect. There's really one of the questions we've gotten is the impact on players. The players have never really felt this because we were making it up to them, right, and then as this change goes into place, they don't see the gaming tax, but they're also not seeing any change in when I deposit $100, I have $100 because that VAT went away, and I think our strategy in 2025 to take the brunt of that tax and not pass it along to players has turned out to be a fantastic decision. It's been great for player retention, player acquisition. We've talked about it on previous calls.
We were growing our gross gaming revenue in excess of 50% throughout the year. So that sets us up with a great base of business, consistent players, loyal players heading into 2026. So while it can get better, and we've got this new temporary tax in Colombia, we're already in a much better situation and set up for really nice success next year or this year, I guess it is.
Right. And have you seen all the players in the market, let's say, act rationally in terms of reduce, not just shift, promote that VAT spend, move it to being hyper-promotional in other areas? Everyone's just operating more profitably now?
I think we're seeing a rational environment there. Just to be clear, I'm not trying to tell you that all of our bonusing has gone away because even throughout 2025, bonusing for new player sign-ups and for VIPs and continued reactivation bonusing and ongoing bonusing, that existed and that still exists here in 2026, so there's going to be bonusing, but for the industry and for us, it's just not nearly as significant as it was last year.
I'd like to just add one more thing. From the perspective of the government, the gaming regulator is also going to start generating more taxes now because the industry, including us, is not bonusing as much to the players, and therefore, that was being reduced from the amount of money that was being provided in tax to the gaming regulator, so now the gaming regulator's income will be higher and those funds will be more readily available and used for funding the healthcare needs of the country, which is one of the primary goals of why the legal regulator framework was set up originally, so that's something also that I think is a positive in terms of the regulator feeling better about them getting a larger amount of revenues this year than perhaps they got last y ear.
Okay.
And Kyle, you provide the qualitative commentary that this is a net positive. Anything quantitatively you can provide or ways to think about it?
Yeah, so I think we'll wait until we'll have our earnings call in a month or so. So we'll wait to put all the numbers around it. I think one of the things we had talked about in the past that at least at the time of our last earnings call, that the annual impact on us on the old tax was maybe roughly $70 million in revenue and $25 million in EBITDA. So maybe use that as a starting point for what we might get back, knowing that the revenue should bounce back because that bonusing is gone and that EBITDA would be somewhere in the middle there.
Right. Okay. That's really helpful. And so you mentioned Colombia growing over 50%. Just how are broad trends in that market going in terms of what you're seeing? And we talked about the competitive dynamics, but just customer acquisition, the product you have in the market versus competitors. Does this still feel like a stronghold for you guys?
Yeah. Richard, you want to comment on product, and then I'll just maybe give a trend.
Sure. So I mean, we've said this before, and it continues to be true. What we have built for ourselves in North America is very innovative and competitive, and it's allowed us to take a smaller brand, invest less money, and still deliver a top performance in the marketplace, and that same investment we've made in R&D and the technology platform and how we treat our customers and how we offer them unique experiences, that translates extremely well over to Latin America, including Colombia, Mexico, Peru, because we're bringing a high-quality experience that is differentiated by U.S. standards. It's even more differentiated by, I think, the Latin American standards, so whereas most folks just have very simple things, what we have built is far more complex and rewarding to the players who play with us.
I think the product is really high quality there, and that allows us to be successful in all the markets where we enter. We are finding really strong growth in all the markets down there that we've entered into. There are different stages of maturity for us as a company. All three markets are still growing very fast. As you know, we're the largest in Colombia, but we're also growing very, very fast in Mexico, continuing to grow share in that market. Peru is also something that's been making a lot of progress where we've actually just almost finalized a lot of our last things we wanted to really do in that market to localize the experience sufficiently, which often includes custom payment methods.
While you always launch with a few custom methods, you optimize them over time, and you always identify a few more that you want to add to your portfolio to ensure you have the right mix for what the players want, both from a digital and retail standpoint, both from a deposit and withdrawal standpoint. You really can't have any weaknesses in the options you provide the players. We're at the point now, for example, Peru, where we've just finished recently some of the things we wanted to achieve on the roadmap. That's an opportunity for us to even be more aggressive in the future in terms of marketing. We do like all three countries there, and we are growing nicely in all three of them. I'm not sure, Kyle, you might want to speak less about the product side and more about the performance.
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, part of it was, is the Colombia story over? And absolutely not. I mean, if you look at the Q3 data or numbers, I mentioned GGR was up pretty significantly, but the player counts in Q3 in Latin America were up 30%. But part of that is because July, we were comping against the prior year Copa América soccer tournament, where we had doubled our player base in that month of July. So August and September were up over 50% in terms of monthly active users in LatAm, which obviously a big part of that is Colombia. And you're talking about 400,000 plus users. So it's a pretty big base that we're growing off of. So I think that sets us up well for 2026. Q4 was continuation of that.
I'm not going to try and get people to model continued growth at 50%, but we're very confident that it's a healthy market for growth in and of itself and that we should be able to outpace that. Maybe one thing just while we're on LatAm that's particularly exciting down there, although it's probably exciting for the whole business, is World Cup coming this summer. And I mentioned the Copa two years ago where we doubled our active player count in June and July. So just a massive win for us there. And this should be a similar sort of experience where we're going to have the opportunity to bring in all sorts of new players. Some of them will be new and excited dedicated sports bettors. Others will be there for the World Cup itself and the nationalism.
And we'll be able to convert a lot of those players to online casino, which is actually growing faster for us in Colombia than sports is in recent quarters. So that'll be a big event for us. We're pretty excited about it.
Yeah. And especially with the expanded field too. I've heard some theories that maybe the holds will be low. But either way, expanded field needs more handle. So it's more revenue and more gross profit.
Yeah. More games helps more handle. But also another point to make is that the 2022 World Cup was hosted in the Middle East, whereas this one will be, as you know, in the Americas of Mexico, U.S., and Canada. So the time zone will be much more appealing to a larger percentage of the betting population because the games will be featured in the evenings in the same time zone as the betting population. So that's going to probably also help us and others with World Cup.
Yeah. No, that's a great point. Wanted to ask on customer acquisition costs and just how it's been trending.
Richard, you touched on this earlier, but we get this question a lot from investors just in terms of, okay, well, you have Kalshi spending a whole lot more in entering the market, but then is DraftKings and FanDuel diverting their spend? I know they're not spending a lot now, but they probably will be later in the year from OSB to prediction markets. But then also you mentioned how you spend locally, so maybe you're not impacted at all, but maybe if you can just walk through those dynamics and what you're seeing from a customer acquisition standpoint?
Maybe I'll start, and then Kyle, feel free to add in. So I think the focus on a brand that is singular in the focus at this point for iCasino, it's an authentic casino brand. There are land-based casinos around the country with the Rivers brand. So it's really authentic as a casino brand. And that allows us to really target a player who's looking for a casino experience. And those players are worth a whole lot because we know the revenues for a casino player far exceed those generated from an average sportsbook player. And then you talk about all the different methods we use to market, which is digital marketing, performance marketing, affiliate marketing, TV ads, out of home, all the billboards and sponsorships of teams, influencers.
We have a Rivers Network, which is our wholly owned asset of ours where we have talent really talking about sports, but often focusing on casino players as well, casino content being streaming players, watching the games, playing games, slot games, and talking about the experience and growing audience. So I think we just do so many things that are reaching a demographic that really isn't being reached by the other methods, and they're not really the target for them. And we're offering a unique experience that's differentiated. So when we do talk about things that are ads, we're really showing them what we offer and how far different it is from what others are typically offering. So we are putting a lot of effort into communicating to our prospective customers what makes us unique because when a player joins us, they love us.
So our goal is to figure out how to translate those unique elements that we bring to the table to a customer before they've had a chance to try you out. Because sometimes you have to try it to say, "Oh, I love what I just experienced," but we've been working on messaging to ensure that prospective players can understand the uniqueness of our product prior to registering with us. So I think on the marketing side, we're very localized. We're very focused. We have a very robust marketing capability, and it's constantly getting better, which you can see from the results we've had the last couple of quarters where we've done something that in my 20-plus years in the industry is rare to do, which is to grow your volume of new customers to record volumes and at the same time reducing the cost to do so per customer.
Usually, when you're creating a larger volume, you're also increasing your cost for customers. But to do both simultaneously is something that I think is harder to achieve and something that we've been able to do. And we continue to feel we have a great opportunity to continue to perform really well on the marketing side of our business.
Understood. Yeah. I was just going to say the marketing team has done such a fantastic job bringing down those costs. And it's why on our last call, we pointed out going into Q4, our expectation to spend more in the fourth quarter on marketing because there's just too many opportunities for us to acquire new players at really good values. And I think you should expect that trend to continue into 2026, that our marketing team has got a lot of initiatives that I'm not going to commit to lower cost to acquire players in 2026. But if we can keep them where they are, great value and a reason for us to invest more this year.
Understood. And maybe on that point, Kyle, I mean, if you just look at the EBITDA margins of the company, I mean, it's pretty amazing. It was -16% in 2022 and then got slightly positive in 2023, 10% EBITDA margins in 2024, and we have 13.5% margins in 2025. So quite the progression. How should we think about longer medium-term margins for this business? And I don't want to step on any potential investor today that's coming, but.
I'm not going to get ahead of our earnings call and our guidance for 2026, except to kind of repeat things we've said before, which is this is a growth business that also has leverage in the model. We should improve gross margins in 2026. We should spend more in marketing, but also spend less as a percentage of revenue because of a robust revenue growth. And we should continue to get leverage over that line. On the G&A side, we're continuing to invest in the business and invest in people and technology. So maybe there's a little less leverage there, but we'll improve our EBITDA margins in 2026. When you look out a little longer term, we've talked about our expectation to get to low to mid 20% EBITDA margins.
Now, we need a couple more online casino markets in North America to launch and get a few years under their belt, and that'll help get us there. In the absence of that, I think we still march in that direction, but we may only be a few years away from adding a couple of markets, as we talked about earlier, if things go well.
Understood, and Richard, I have to ask you about. I know we only have a couple of minutes left, but just had to ask about technology. Just anything that you've recently launched that's particularly been impactful or anything to call out on the product roadmap for 2026?
Yeah, I'd say there's two things. One is we've really optimized the user journey even further, which is when the player gets a message from us, as I described earlier, and they decide they want to give us a try, all the ways you reduce friction for that user and steps for that user to have to do in order to sign up successfully, pass the KYC test, make sure they register the proper payment, the method they prefer to use, and are ready to start playing with us. That trend, that flow, as different jurisdictions have different requirements, I think we've really done a lot of improvements there. And when you do that, that also helps drive down the cost to acquire players, which then feeds into all the margin discussion we just had.
The second thing is, as I said earlier, our goal is to be better and different, and so most companies can't really figure out how to be better because most have commodity products, and so we've always made a day-one decision in 2012. When I started the company, it was, we're not going to ever be the same as everybody else. We're going to always be differentiated, so how do you differentiate in a world where most people think casino games are commodities? Well, you offer players more ways to win in unexpected fun ways, and so what some of our competitors are starting to evolve to is they're offering promotions before a player session begins. And we do that too. We've done that from day one. That was our first thing we built 12 years ago, but that's kind of where they end right now.
What we've done is we've built this innovative system that lets us reward these players while they're playing in the session with us in real time. So we've been able to grow this new features and new functions that add to that ability for us to offer variety. So it's not the same thing over and over again. If you bring one type of mechanic to a player in the middle of a session, you get this thing popping up that says, here's a present for you. And the player's like, well, I really love this present. And you open the present, you get a prize. That's great. But after 10x , the player's not going to think it's as fun anymore. So you have to create a lot of variety. So we've been able to build over now, like I said, 13 years, a huge amount of variety.
We keep adding new things to the product mix, like a toolbox. We have a wrench. We have a screwdriver. We have a hammer. We have all these different tools here. We built up over many years. So now we can use them and create a different experience each time for different players and customize and personalize them for different players. So other things we built that are new, new lobby, new jackpot system, new bonus store, new live lobby experience, a new wheelspin, a new wheelspin engine, I should say, new scratch card framework, new delivery methods to engage players. And all these things together, just when you bring them out to players, they feel like we're living, breathing operators because we are.
If you combine that with a customer service team that still has a goal of treating every customer like a VIP from day one, which is everyone says that, harder to execute on it, but we've now won five years in a row of best customer service in the industry, so we think we deliver on that. And so when you earn the player trust, you offer a lot of unique things in the product, and you have a service team that's really trying to think through, how do I show that player that I'm a thoughtful person here or a business that has a heart that's thoughtful, that isn't just outsourced it to some group that doesn't have any incentive or motivation to sort of serve as a customer the way we want to.
It all adds up to create the winning experience, which I think is what we have, and we're trying to get better at it.
That's great. And I know we're at time here, but maybe one last quick one. Just what's one or two items that would make 2026 a successful year for Rush Street?
We have the most exciting roadmap I can recall since we ever started this company. I think executing on that roadmap is one thing that's going to be a big thing for us here in 2026. I was going to say the second thing is really the great thing about our business is that our existing markets are still growing extremely fast. We're continuing to take advantage of that growth. We have that great core business. In addition, we're growing share as well in those markets. The markets are growing fast, and we're growing share in those markets. Our core business is healthy. We have Alberta coming with these new product features I just described to you that are coming. We also have new markets that are going to be folding in in the future.
So I think I'm never been as excited as I am now by the scope of all these things we have working on that are all working well for us right now. Like I said, new markets, existing markets, sports, casino. Our poker's growing share everywhere we launched that. So we kind of have everything working really well right now. I think it's a really great momentum that we have, and we're excited to see how that results in continued growth in 2026.
Great. Let's leave it there. Thanks, Richard. Thanks, Kyle. And thanks to everyone who joined us on the webcast this afternoon. Great to see you guys again.
Thanks, Bernie. Great talking to you.
Thanks.