Press start: How Zoot targets video gamers with its Arcade-like UX  

Social sweepstakes gaming has ballooned from a niche industry to one worth a head-turning $4.9bn in net revenue in 2025, according to estimates by Eilers & Krejcik Gaming (EKG). That’s a 42% jump on the $3.5bn in estimated net revenue generated last year, says the boutique analyst firm. With that degree of rocketing growth, it is little wonder new sweepstakes entrants are popping up at a rapid pace, which in turn has drawn the ire of certain state gaming regulators that deem it unregulated gambling. One new sweepstakes entrant in 2024 was Zoot. Yet this startup is different in that it eschewed the ubiquitous menu of slots and casino titles in favor of building a suite of in-house games to appeal to young adult male video gamers.

For CEO and co-founder Sean Ryan, who previously spent more than a decade at Facebook and co-founded white label social casino developer Open Wager, there is a big untapped opportunity creating games this demographic wants to play. One example is its Street Fighter-esque crash game, Celebrity KO, featuring household names and world leaders reimagined as 2D pugilists squaring off in a 90s arcade game. Billed as a next generation social gaming platform, Zoot has raised $2.3m in seed funding and is now embarking on a Series A round as it aims to hit profitability in 2026. Moreover, Ryan insists there are “very big plans” for the business in the years ahead.

EGR: Why did you decide to launch Zoot?

Sean Ryan (SR): Fifteen years ago, my business partner [John Cahill] and I built a product called Luckyland Slots. We were attempting to create a white label social casino company but it didn’t work out and it was sold for parts to VGW, where it is now the number two offering for them, doing 600 million [dollars] a year in revenue. So, that was slightly frustrating, although full credit to VGW for ripping out our back-end and putting in sweeps.

So, when my business partner, who is Zoot’s CTO, thought a year-and-a-half ago what should we build, sweeps was an obvious place to go because we both worked in real-money gaming and payments. We saw the opening wasn’t to be like everybody else but to bring a video game mentality to real-money gaming. We wanted to be different, so we built what we thought was something more interesting and aimed mostly at men, as opposed to women who tend to mostly play slots. So, no slots and all instant games. We built the platform and the games ourselves.

EGR: How long did that process take?

SR: We started the company in January 2024 and launched to the public in September 2024, so it took us roughly eight to nine months. We have a very good [tech] team based in Romania and we had a pretty clear vision of what we wanted to build, bringing all the social features of a [mobile strategy] game like Clash of Clans. So, daily and weekly quests, leveling up, leaderboards, messaging, all of which are not really present in any real-money gaming platforms. And then we wanted to bring a fun version of games. If I look at Aviator, a classic crash game, I think it’s really boring. There’s no sound, there are barely any graphics, and there is barely any interactivity.

It works, by the way, and is a very successful game, but we always thought the next thing you are going to see is more interactivity, higher fidelity graphics, and better audio. We’ve seen this in the history of video games. Just like the first video game was Pong, which was a white ball on a screen, we now have Fortnite. We wanted [to create] more fun games and turn out a game a week to take advantage of common culture, trends, news, that type of thing. Again, it’s all about entertainment and less about real-money gaming, although that is clearly the business model.

EGR: Why the name Zoot?

SR: You’re always looking for a short name that people can spell and remember and that’s distinctive. The young men in my household — my three sons aged 21, 23, and 25 — said that to be ‘zooted’ is, in American slang, to be f***ed up, so either drunk or high. The young’uns all know it’s common slang, so it’s kind of fun and catchy.

EGR: You mentioned that the games are aimed at men, but can you sum up a typical Zoot player and give us a flavor of the games on offer?

SR: The average age is early 20s. They do sports betting, and when they aren’t betting on sports, they come to us. They want higher volatility because their risk awareness is different [to players on typical sweeps products] and they want arcade-like activity as opposed to slots-like activity. We thought the way to be different was to go after a less-served demographic. We thought the TikTok and [Instagram] reels generation is going to want quicker play cycles. We looked at crash games, mine games, and plinko. Those are kind of boring, although we do offer them. But what else could we do to make them more fun?

So, we built a video game-like front-end, while the back-end is still the same engine. Our most innovative game, in my opinion, is our fighting game Celebrity KO, which looks a lot like Street Fighter. It’s a crash game back-end but with a fighting front-end and celebrities like [Mark] Zuck[erberg], Elon [Musk], [Donald] Trump, and [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy. The one I really love and pushed for is Beer Pong, a drinking game that we all grew up with in the US where you bounce a ping-pong ball into a cup. It has a very creative front-end and plinko back-end. We put out a game every week or two, and we try to bring innovation to the category while still keeping to simple play cycles and RTP-based rules.

EGR: Having the US president square off against Ukraine’s president in Celebrity KO is quite a bold move.

SR: It was originally going to be Trump versus [Russia’s President Vladimir] Putin, but all of a sudden it became Trump versus Zelenskyy due to the news. It could be Trump against King Charles soon. What we try to do is bring brands, music, fashion, athletes, celebrities, and influencers to a category which is, quite frankly, a bit staid. Some of the slots in the regulated space have historically had brands, so we’re trying to bring that to sweeps but make it a little more for younger players and more fun.

EGR: Did you bootstrap the business or seek out funding?

SR: I funded it myself to start with, then we brought in a venture round of about $2.3m. Now that we’ve finished the platform and tested the games, we’re doing our Series A round of financing. Because we are somewhere between video games, real-money gaming and, to a certain extent, cryptocurrency, it gives us access to a wide set of investors.

EGR: What’s the environment like for attracting venture capital right now?

SR: The reason there are so many sweeps companies is because they are doing so well and are able to get to profitability relatively quickly. The question is how do you value these companies in an environment where there’s regulatory uncertainty? So, what you did historically when this occurred is try to get to profitability right away, and then you figure out how to expand from there.

So, for us, that’s the goal. It’s profitability in the next year and then we control our own destiny. But we have very big plans for this offering. We will probably offer multiple brands or look at non-US sweepstakes options. There’s a bunch of ways to go with this because we think our uniqueness is bringing common culture and a video game mentality to a real-money gaming style of play.

EGR: What KPIs are you able to share?

SR: Look, we are tiny. We have barely done any user acquisition. I come from the old school Silicon Valley, which is you raise money, build everything, and you then raise the next round to scale it […] there are many bigger and more successful companies than us. We believe that being differentiated in our approach will be more sustainable. We believe in controlling our own platform and having a significant first-party studio. We’re adding third-party content to bulk up the catalog and appeal to more people. So, I think that mix is important; we can’t just have our own originals. But it does allow us to control a lot of our destiny and make the types of games we want to make. We also acknowledge that players will come to us and they’ll want to see Buffalo Slots or whatever, and we should give it to them.

EGR: Can you tell us about the rollout of Squads?

SR: If you play Clash of Clans or Clash Royale, you can get a group of your friends or family into a small group. The idea [of Squads] is you can get into smaller groups and have a shared jackpot. So, you have 50 groups of 20 people bonded by family or location playing competitions with more social behavior. For us, Squads is the final part of the puzzle for the platform because it is incredibly important as a way to make it seem like it’s a group effort, as opposed to just by myself playing against a slot or crash game. I want to win or lose as a group and give each other compliments or grief, instead of just chatting with random people.

EGR: You recently ported Zoot to Telegram for non-US users, but does it work the same way or is it a watered-down version?

SR: It looks exactly like Zoot on the website. There’s a [Zoot] bot on Telegram that you just pull up. It took us two weeks to build the system in a way we can easily port it and, yes, the games all work the same way. You have a couple of user interface changes, and you have to integrate with Telegram’s payments system, which is actually quite good. It uses the in-app purchase system of Apple and Google, and then you flip it into your currency. You cash out to a TON [The Open Network] wallet. Those are the rules of Telegram.

The Telegram team have done a nice job of building a pretty good set of APIs, so we were able to move there pretty quickly […] Telegram is much bigger in emerging markets like Brazil and India [than it is in the US], so we built unique content. We built Cricket Plinko for the Indian crowd and Soccer Plinko for the Brazilian crowd. Regional-specific content is something we think will give us an advantage over time.

EGR: Is social gaming and sweepstakes where you’ll find the most innovation right now?

SR: It’s great to see innovation in the business, although it’s easier to innovate in a less-regulated environment. I’m hopeful that the regulated side will start to see some of what we and other people are doing and bring a little more innovation […] three billion people in the world play video games but many fewer do real-money gaming. When I look at the TAM, or the total addressable market, I’m going after people who play video games because I think that’s the larger play for companies like us. They’re used to having a certain set of features and a certain level of quality and interactivity that not all real-money gaming sites have.

EGR: Is your long-term aim with Zoot to become profitable and sell up?

SR: We aren’t thinking about that at the moment. The trend lines around the globe are clear: real-money gaming and all its various deviations — skill-based, prediction markets, whatever — is growing. It’s not turning around. Secondly, attention spans are getting shorter, so games have to go faster. We think we’re well placed. We think this can be a very large company and we think we’ll end up being a multi-brand company. Zoot is our first somewhat male-oriented brand, [but] maybe we have a female brand, maybe a Latino brand using the same platform and same games studio but a different approach.

Thirdly, what I believe is going to change the world, is the rise of crypto casinos, and particularly stablecoins [pegged to a currency like the US dollar]. It’s a much more seamless way to pay as opposed to sending bitcoin or ether, which is highly volatile and hard to use. So, I believe this industry is underestimating how big crypto casinos are going to become.