Established in 2018 by Vera&John co-founders Dan Andersson and Jörgen Nordlund, LCKY Group – or Glitnor Group as it was known until the corporate makeover in early 2026 – is a business on the up.
With a solid foothold in markets like Sweden and the Netherlands, the Malta-based operator behind sites including LuckyCasino, OneCasino and HappyCasino recently secured a €55m financing facility with HG Vora Capital Management.
The financing facility is being deployed to execute M&A, including the acquisition of RoyalCasino, a brand LCKY Group CEO Richard Brown describes as “strong” and “trusted” in Denmark’s regulated igaming market.
Indeed, Brown, who joined LCKY Group from GiG at the start of 2024, says this highly cash-generative business continues to use “high-quality acquisitions” to support organic growth, as he explains here in a conversation with EGR.
EGR: In January, Glitnor Group rebranded to LCKY Group, a move you referred to as a “clearer expression of our ambition, our culture and the brands we are building”. Can you expand on the thinking and strategy behind the new name?
Richard Brown (RB): The business was started in 2018, when the Swedish market regulated. It was founded by Daniel Andersen and Jorgen Nordlund, both with long and storied careers in the industry. Their ambition was to become a pan-European regulated casino operator.
Sweden and the Nordics was both their home and starting point. The name ‘Glitnor’ is a reference to Norse mythology. But since then, the business, especially over the last couple of years, has become a truly pan-European multinational, with operations from Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark to Spain and Ontario, Canada. The company name hasn’t resonated as well on an international stage, so as the group matured, we felt it appropriate to rebrand towards a name that was much more internationally placed.
We also have a multitude of offices now. We started off in Sweden, Bulgaria and Malta and now we have offices in Malia, Barcelona, the Netherlands and Canada. LCKY is a name that encompasses the journey the business has been on and also looks ahead to further expansion.
EGR: These expansion plans have been bolstered by a €55m financing facility with HG Vora. What was the driver behind that?
RB: The primary focus of that facility was around the closing of OneCasino, and now we have the RoyalCasino acquisition, which is very close to completion. The business itself is very strong. It can fund itself and is highly cash generative as well. In that sense, we’re pushing forward with our own growth plans and organic structures. So, the financing facility was entirely related to our M&A activity.
EGR: Can you tell us more about the RoyalCasino acquisition? What challenges have you faced in the process?
RB: RoyalCasino is a strong, trusted brand within the Danish market, and has been around for a long time. There is a small but exceptionally talented team there, and we felt it was both a very strong cultural and market fit. We have a very nascent presence in Denmark today. We can see multiple aspects of how its market dynamics work that lend themselves well to us. We can incorporate the team’s local experience, knowledge and understanding to leverage our own brands as well, while giving them the scale advantages we have within LCKY Group.
It’s somewhat of a symbiotic relationship between the two companies. We think we can add value into what they do and vice versa. We’re really pleased to be bringing the team in, hopefully over the next few months, to give us a really strong position in Denmark, which has been a really good market for casino over the years. We can support them to grow, and they can help to dramatically expand our presence within Denmark.
EGR: Looking a bit further back, the company announced the acquisition of OneCasino in late 2024 and said it had “international” designs once the brand refresh was publicised. So, what’s next?
RB: The acquisition of OneCasino was a strong step forward for us strategically. They had a really strong product and really strong teams across multiple locations, and the merger of the two businesses also presented us with an opportunity to rebrand as one group and operate as a collective, as opposed to acquirer and acquired.
In terms of geographies we’re looking at, we’ve built up very strong presence in our core markets of Sweden and the Netherlands. We’ve also just opened an office in Melilla, one of the Spanish enclaves in the North African coast, which is indicative of where our focus areas are.
EGR: Staying with Spain, LCKY has said the market is particularly important for the long-term growth plans. What makes it so uniquely promising?
RB: I think we have a strong product and market fit towards the dynamics within Spain. We have the operational capacity from the brand that was operating there before. We look at markets where we can deploy a multi-brand strategy, as we’ve done successfully in other markets. Not all markets are suitable. No markets are ever easy, but we believe we can push forward and make significant strides within that region and that demography. We have the setup and the quality of product to be able to do so.
EGR: Reflecting more on the legacy brands, LuckyCasino has been one of the standout success stories in the Nordic casino sector in recent years. What has driven the brand’s performance, and how easily can that success be replicated in new markets?
RB: A few things have contributed towards it. The people working inside the business from day one have a real foundational experience within the industry. Most have been in it for 15 to 20 years. They have operational experience of understanding the consumer and have designed the business to operate in highly regulated markets with high tax burdens and competition from both regulated and unregulated operators. We haven’t had to transform the business from pre-regulated to regulated; we’ve been able to design it towards high-barrier-to-entry markets and deal with the complexities that brings.
EGR: As LCKY continues to expand, how will you balance launching new brands, developing existing assets like LuckyCasino and OneCasino and pursuing further acquisition opportunities?
RB: We try to be immensely practical with the opportunities we have in front of us and very fluid in our decision-making. We’re able to either ramp up or scale back decision making very effectively, and that agility is quite an enabler for us. We like to have a two- or three-year goal for where we want to be in each of the markets, running it and prioritising it in a cyclical fashion. But we also react to the environment around us to provide that fluidity within our roadmaps to be able to go after various different opportunities and push forward where needed. It’s about trade-offs.
We continue to develop our market share across the markets we operate in and support the strong organic growth we’ve had over the last three to four years. Ever since this business started, it’s been focused around a really strong growth potential in regulated markets, supplemented with high-quality acquisitions.
EGR: These growth plans have been supported by hiring of Alex Manning as CTO, marking LCKY’s first senior leadership appointment. What does he bring to the business?
RB: As a group, we operate our own proprietary full-stack platform. With the group’s expansion into multiple new markets, we need to consolidate our technical capabilities and accelerate our ability to use technology to forward the business. We felt it would put us on a sound footing to bring in someone of Alex’s experience, who can take a view of how to drive our technology strategy over the coming three to five years.
The entire organisation is responsible and collaborative towards the expansion into different markets and the technical side of things plays a key role in that, such as our roadmaps and product development cycles. We’ll be able to dedicate a good chunk of time to how we effectively build towards those new market entries, or how we develop the products for the markets we already operate in. In conjunction, it’s also about making sure our technology remains very competitive and can continue to be built forward in the coming years.
EGR: How have you dealt with increased regulation in jurisdictions like the Netherlands and Sweden?
RB: The biggest competition we have now, in particular within the Dutch market, is from the unregulated space. The unlicensed brands have extremely compelling offers to the consumer, and we are, in some respects, restricted from competing against them, and therefore we’ve had to adjust accordingly. I think an advantage for the company is it has been set up very much to operate within these markets with high barriers to entry and heavy regulatory environments.
We’ve been able to adapt to the changes required, whether they be technical or regulatory or compliance based. We believe the regulations create a dynamic for players that we need to address. We spend a significant amount of time thinking about how to give the players the best possible experience within that framework, so they’re not drawn outside of [the regulatory] structure. It remains challenging but, as I said, we operate with the purpose to work in the most tightly regulated markets.
EGR: You touched on the unregulated market. What needs to be done to combat its growth?
RB: We have to keep encouraging the government to take action [against illegal operators]. We need to focus on controlling our controllables and work out how to compete them. And while we’re on the back foot in many aspects of what we can do on the regulated side of things, as long as we focus on that, then we will continue to drive our performance and market share within the regulated space.
EGR: Looking ahead, what does success look like for LCKY Group in the next two years? Are there particular milestones or objectives you think will define the next phase of the company’s evolution?
RB: What success looks like for us is the continual expansion of market share within our core markets, combined with consistent and developing growth within our new market entries. Continuing expansion of our geographic footprint across the regulator casino space is also important, so we get to a position where we can legitimately call ourselves one of the a few leading pan-European casino operators. We’ll certainly achieve that in two to three years’ time if we continue to do what we’re doing. We just need to have a lot of faith, a lot of passion and do a huge amount of hard work. The opportunities are there in front of us.
The post Best of luck: Richard Brown on LCKY Group’s growth ambitions first appeared on EGR Intel.
The multi-brand operator’s CEO discusses the rationale behind the recent RoyalCasino acquisition, ever-tightening regulation in core markets, and what the recent corporate rebrand symbolises
The post Best of luck: Richard Brown on LCKY Group’s growth ambitions first appeared on EGR Intel.