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On Monday, 08 September 2025, Genius Sports (NYSE:GENI) presented at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025, highlighting its strategic focus on technology-driven sports data solutions. The company emphasized its robust partnerships and innovative approaches, though challenges in rights fees and market competition were noted.
Key Takeaways
- Genius Sports processes data for over 300,000 live events annually, enhancing sportsbooks’ offerings.
- Strategic partnerships with the NFL and European leagues are central to its growth.
- BetVision platform is driving increased in-play betting, especially in the U.S.
- The media segment, FanHub, is gaining traction with non-sports betting brands.
- $82 million of free cash flow was reinvested in the business last year.
Partnerships and Technological Advancements
- Genius Sports has extended its partnership with the NFL through 2030, focusing on data distribution and marketing services.
- The company secured exclusive rights for the European Leagues Association and Serie A, leveraging its comprehensive platform.
- Innovative technologies like Dragon, utilizing networked iPhones, are enhancing data collection and reducing reliance on human statisticians.
Media and Market Expansion
- The media segment, FanHub, is attracting brands such as Coca-Cola and Gatorade, aiming to engage sports fans through advertising.
- Increased guidance last quarter was attributed to strong growth in the media business.
- Genius Sports is focusing on rolling out its product stack and ensuring broad adoption.
In-Play Betting Growth
- BetVision is significantly increasing in-play betting rates, with 72% of bets made in-play on the platform.
- The U.S. market presents a substantial growth opportunity, with in-play betting currently lower than in Europe.
Capital Allocation and Financial Strategy
- Genius Sports generated $82 million of free cash flow last year, reinvesting it into the business.
- The company is selectively pursuing M&A opportunities that are accretive and margin-enhancing.
- Maintaining a disciplined approach to capital returns is a priority.
For more detailed insights, refer to the full transcript below.
Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:
Unidentified speaker: All right, let’s get started with the next session. It’s my pleasure to have Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO of Genius Sports. Thanks for being at the conference again this year.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Thanks for having me.
Unidentified speaker: To level set for those less familiar with the story, just introduce the audience to the business that you’ve built, how Genius fits into the broader sports ecosystem.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Sure. Okay. For those who don’t know, Genius Sports is a technology company. We’re a software business, we’re based out of the U.K., but we have various different software offices globally. Our focus is really around data capture, data collection, data processing, and then the distribution of that data to lots of different parties who use it for different means. The one that most people are most familiar with is the use of the data in the betting space. We will collect event data from grounds, from sports such as the NFL to U.K. football, all the way through to handball and volleyball. We’ll collect the live data and we’ll package that up and send that to sportsbooks in order for those sportsbooks to offer live events.
To give you an idea, we’re probably doing a bit north of 300,000 live events a year and enabling all those sportsbooks to offer product. On top of that, we will often marry that data with our own pricing technology, our own trading services, and we will offer the sportsbooks the ability for us to create the lines, offer the prices, and offer not only the basic products that they have, but much wider sets of products as well. In terms of scale, we provide pretty much every bookmaker or sportsbook you’ve ever heard of in the legal regulated market. It would be a surprise to me if there was one we didn’t. We’ve been doing it for quite a few years.
The other two areas of our business are, we’ve got a media business that’s growing pretty rapidly, which is really around putting sports fans in front of content and advertising that is relevant to them. We work with brands, we work with, again, with the sportsbooks. We take data that we have, data on the games that are going on, and in the moments of high emotion, we’ll be able to offer an advert to a sports fan. For an example for that is you may be watching a stream, a WNBA game, for example, and a basket’s scored. We’ll know that basket’s being scored. We’ll know who’s watching that game at that moment, and we’ll be able to put an advert around that, augmented on the screen, and drive growth for anyone from a bookmaker all the way through to Peloton. That’s that part of the business.
The final part of the business is really around a computer vision, machine learning, AI business that we bought a few years ago. What we’ve really done is we’ve taught it to understand sport. We’ve trained our computers to understand sports games, and we have various applications of that now. We collect that, we recreate the events, and we offer that to people like U.K. football for automated offsides. There’s a product called Semi-Automated Offside Technology, which we’ve been working with U.K. football on, which automatically identifies when there are offsides. Also, on top of that, we’ll be providing things like a product called Performance Center, which is where we’re able to help people understand how their players are performing.
Overall, we’ve got a very wide product set, but really the focus has been around using data and the various different methods that we have to collect that data to drive the business.
Unidentified speaker: Cool. Let’s talk about that data rights portfolio. You’ve been very busy over the past few months. You recently announced an extension of the NFL partnership. Yep. Talk about that updated deal in terms of what was incremental, that is driving a stickier, more deeper relationship with the NFL, and how the data rights increases compared to what your internal expectations were for that inflation for the incremental years.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Sure. To give a little bit of history, we’ve been working with the NFL since 2021. Increasingly, we’re finding leagues are much more focused on wanting partnerships, not only where you’re writing them a check and just having sports data, but actually where you’re providing incremental value. We did a deal with them in 2021, laid out a vision of technology that we could help them with, including taking and distributing a lot of their live video to sportsbooks. We’ve kind of leveraged that partnership and we’ve worked with them closely to the point at which they waived a termination right that they had after, I think, four years and increased the length of the deal, having just renewed it, which will run all the way through to 2030. I’ll also add that the NFL own about 80% of our business as well, so we’re very closely tied to them.
The relationship’s really grown a lot. We started off really focusing on the sports data and the distribution of that to sportsbooks, and then we’ve added in a product called BetVision, which I highly recommend any of you sports fans to go and have a look at, where you can go and watch pretty much any NFL game that’s being played live. We integrate that into sportsbooks platforms, so if you go onto a FanDuel or a DraftKings, you’ll be able to log in and actually watch those games with integrated betting as well. As the relationship grew, we’ve helped them expand overseas, but the bigger change and the main focus has been really around this sort of additional marketing services.
We take a lot of their own content, we take a lot of their own websites, we take a lot of their own streaming platform, and we monetize that through the advertising platform that I mentioned in my monologue at the beginning.
Unidentified speaker: Cool. The other two that I wanted to talk about, you recently won the exclusive rights for the European Leagues Association, Serie A, from other players in the space. What do you think drove from those leagues’ perspective to switching partners to Genius from a, you know, a technology or product perspective? How did the prices paid for these rights compare to what the prior partners were paying, do you think?
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah, so it’s a really interesting deal. Both of them are actually quite similar. Both deals were held by other parties in the sector. We’re seeing our part of the industry consolidating quite rapidly. You know, IMG and Stats Perform are less prevalent in a lot of these deals now. We’re seeing a very strong move in this sort of consolidation that we’re seeing. The rights became available. The advantage that we have that nobody else has is we’ve got a complete platform that does everything that a sport can require end-to-end. As I said, from offering things like Semi-Automated Offside Technology through to managing their marketing, through to offering their products to sportsbooks, we’re unrivaled in our ability to offer that product set.
What that means is that the sports, when they’re looking at bringing a new partner in, the focus is less on the monetary rights on the individual deal, which is historically what it was. There was all this frenzy for deals years ago. It’s now much more about how can we provide and deliver technology across the whole breadth of their business in a way that really adds value to them. I mean, you think about these sports, they’ve got multiple different suppliers, and a lot of those suppliers have been there a long time, often with old technologies. Those technologies aren’t as capable as some of the new stuff that we’re putting out there. The opportunity to consolidate those deals for those sports leagues is very attractive. As a result of that, we get very attractive deals.
Rights fees are a fraction of what they were offered before in the market. I’m sure you know the numbers. We’re seeing very attractive reductions in the cost of our rights in a lot of the deals that we’re doing because we’ve got the ability to leverage our technology on a wide basis.
Unidentified speaker: I think most would categorize this as an increasingly duopoly industry with you and Sport Radar. You talked about how yourself and them are, I think, winning deals from a technology perspective from the long tail of players. Just talk about the competitive environment more broadly, the rationality for some of these deals, not just against what you’re winning from the long tail, but you versus Sport Radar as well.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah, I mean, like Sport Radar, they’ve got a great business. I think our focuses are different. As I said, our business has always been about partnering with sports leagues and federations. It’s something that we’ve got a very long history of doing. Our material investments, I guess, over the last sort of three to five years have been around delivering this new generation of tracking and data collection technology. We call it Dragon. What that technology does is, again, it’s completely unique, but we’ve talked, well, what we do is we have a lot of iPhones that we’ve networked together. They’re not wired together. They’re networked together. It doesn’t sound very complicated, but actually, it’s incredibly hard to do. What we do is we put those into stadiums, into sports stadiums. We’ve done it all the way through U.K. football. We’re doing it in part in the NFL.
We’re doing it all the way through European soccer. Now, those cameras allow us to collect pretty much every angle of what’s going on in a game. The reason that those cameras are used is because you have very high quality lenses and very high processing power on an iPhone. The fact that they self-calibrate is hard. The fact that you need to get them to talk to each other in real time is hard. Once those cameras are put into a stadium, we’re able to put an output where we’ve effectively converted video into data. The data that comes out of the game can then be used for lots of different purposes. We will auto-event it, so we will know what’s going on. We will recognize offside. Ultimately, what we then do is we put it through another graphics engine and turn it back into video.
That video is then interactive. It’s completely digital, at which point that video can become an advertising platform for us. We can change the color of a shirt or the advertising logo on it. You can change the angles you’re seeing. You can play with that event. That’s what’s capturing these sports’ imagination. That’s what the broadcasters are getting so excited about because they’re seeing what looks like video or what feels like video, but it’s completely in their and their user’s control. That’s a very, very exciting opportunity that we’ve got. Our focus over the last few years has been investing in that. We’ve invested huge amounts of money in it, and those returns are now coming through. We’re seeing them with lower rights fees. We’re seeing we’re winning more deals. More importantly, we’re also rolling this technology out.
At the moment, the European Leagues Association deal we just signed was dependent on that. We’re rolling it out to 450 stadiums in Europe. The other thing that it allows us to do is not only create all the monetization opportunities where we can go and sell Semi-Automated Offside Technology, we can sell Performance Center, we can sell all of that stuff, but also we’re capturing every event that happens in that ground. The number of events that we’re capturing, the amount of data that we’re processing, and how we’re doing that with effectively no human interaction means it has a very, very positive effect on our margin because we no longer need people to collect it. We no longer need these huge networks of 7,000 or 8,000 statisticians that we have. It’s all being done automatically.
This is a very transformative moment in the way that this sort of market evolves and it works, and we’re very happy with it.
Unidentified speaker: Let’s move to the sportsbook side of the equation from a relationship standpoint. Maybe just level set and talk about the different monetization models with your sportsbook partners. Yep. You just announced this morning, Hard Rock, right?
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yep.
Unidentified speaker: Maybe just talk about the monetization path from here as you think about increased adoption of more markets, more product attach rates, and like for like pricing increases, just how you see that playing out and evolving.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah. As I said, the business model is to provide the data to the sportsbook partners that we have. We work, there’s sort of two main business models we run. One is a profit share or a revenue share or GDR, however you want to frame that. The other is, in certain areas, we’ll also operate fixed fee offerings where we provide the services on a per game basis. More common is the revenue share model. As the market grows, we take share on that. The product sets are evolving quite rapidly. As I said, historically, it was really only the data. Now, increasingly, we’re selling BetVision, which is the product that we’ve announced this morning with Hard Rock, as you said. What we’re doing there is, Hard Rock have taken, effectively, our player. Into that player, we’ve integrated the NFL streams, but also about 32,000 other games as well.
Within that, that then becomes the interface for the sports fan to engage with that game and engage with Hard Rock on these events. What they’re doing there is they’re going in, they’ll be placing bets, they’ll be watching the game, they’ll be seeing adverts, it’s a full user experience. That’s obviously quite a good position for a sports fan to have everything in one place where they can watch and they can engage with the game. They can control it in the way that we talked about a minute ago with the different options. The fact that we have the data coming from Dragon in some places will allow us to, and it will give us a real ability to talk to those individual customers. The evolution of this business has been very much focused around the rollout of and the delivery of BetVision.
We’re seeing a lot of success. Most, almost all the deals that we’re doing now, have BetVision included in them.
Unidentified speaker: Okay. In addition to the growth and adoption of sports betting globally, more broadly as a tailwind, given the different, you know, take rate or commission that you get on in-play betting versus pre-match, that mix shift, especially in the U.S., is a pretty big driver. Just talk about the benefits of a shift towards in-play betting for you guys and what the runway is from here, especially in the U.S., which is lower versus Europe.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah, and the opportunity is absolutely massive. If you look at Europe, you know, look at the U.K., for example, somewhere between 60% and 80% of all bets are made in-play. On top of that, the margins on them are much higher. In the U.S., you choose your number, but call it 30% to 35% of those bets that are made in-play. In-play really means betting during the game for those who aren’t so familiar. It’s betting on every event within the game in real time, which again is why the live data is so important. In Europe, you’re seeing much higher margins and a much higher percentage of all bets being made in-play. In the U.S., because ultimately, it doesn’t feel like it sometimes, but it’s still relatively new, those numbers are much lower and we’re seeing much more increase.
From our point of view, we also get paid roughly three times the amount because the data is more valuable on those in-play games. We have a compounding effect in our deals with the sportsbooks where, as you move to in-play betting, not only do the margins go up, but we also get paid roughly three times the price on them. It’s a much more profitable outcome for us to do that. That’s been a big focus for us. It’s good for us, it’s good for the consumer, it’s good for the sports because the sports remain engaged. Sports fans are constantly looking and engaging with the game, and ultimately, it’s more profitable.
Unidentified speaker: Okay. We touched on it earlier, but the BetVision product, I think, is helping drive that in-play adoption. Maybe just talk about that product more.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Sure.
Unidentified speaker: What that growth curve has looked like from an adoption standpoint of BetVision.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: The interesting number here is, as I think I mentioned before, sort of 30 to 35% of the in-play or bets in the U.S. are made in-play. When you look at BetVision, it’s 72%. When you’re looking at how much people want to watch a game and engage with it in that platform, in that interface, it’s materially higher when they’re able to do it in that fashion. Again, our focus as a business has been about engaging the sportsbooks, our partners, and looking at rolling that product out on a very wide range basis, and including other games in it. We started with the NFL because obviously that’s a key partner of ours and it’s obviously one of the most attractive sports, but also rolling that out with soccer, with basketball, all of those things are working extremely well.
The Hard Rock is just another really good example of what a powerful move that is.
Unidentified speaker: When you think about the growth curve from here for adoption for BetVision, how would you rank order the contribution going forward when you think about onboarding more sports into that product, which you’ve been doing as you’ve expanded beyond the NFL, offering those sports in international markets where maybe the access to streaming of those specific sports is less available versus just broader adoption of BetVision from sportsbooks more broadly who may not have it integrated yet?
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah. The adoption of BetVision by sportsbooks is something that is generally now part of the deals that we do with those sportsbooks. As we renew our contracts for the provision of data, the provision of lines or odds, we will also include in that the provision of BetVision as well. That’s because the two are synonymous in lots of ways as we roll that out. The addition of sports has been interesting because we had a sort of bit of a dilemma when we started BetVision. We started with the NFL, which obviously in terms of volume is only 270 odd games a year. It’s not a high volume game compared to soccer where we’re trading 90,000 games.
The evolution of the product was get it out there, make sure it’s working, make sure there’s adoption, make sure people like it and they’re using it and we know what we’re doing, do a good job for the NFL and then roll it out to the other sports. That’s what we’re seeing now. I think the 32,000 games that we’re now going to be putting through Hard Rock consist of other sports. The reason it’s hard to roll them out is that the BetVision product is not just a streaming player. It’s not just taking a video feed and putting it in. It’s actually so much more than that. We’ve had to teach the computers to understand the game of football. We’ve had to teach them to recognize players.
We’ve had to teach them how the plays work in order to be able to integrate and augment those video streams. That product, obviously, each of those sports takes a little bit of training, a little bit of time, and a little bit of learning. That’s really where we’re going to get into the end of some of that development cycle. We’ve got to the end of it for football, for NFL or American football. We’ve got there now with soccer and basketball. This is an opportunity for us to really start to scale that and marry that with a lot of the new deals we’re doing with the sportsbooks.
Unidentified speaker: Are there additional sports that aren’t currently offered through BetVision that you think lend itself well to an in-play betting type of product? I mean, obviously, sports that have less downtime are tougher to drive in-play betting. I’m just curious, kind of when you think about the incremental sports that you’re most excited about offering through the BetVision product.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah, I mean, we really think of volume sports, like, so I mean, you know, NFL because it’s such an important sport, an important player. Then soccer, huge volumes, you know, probably the biggest betting sport in the world. Basketball, again, huge volumes of games, you know, and our focus has really been on those three areas. You know, football, sorry, soccer, American football, and basketball. As time goes on, we are developing, you know, handball and volleyball and other ways of doing it. Really, to be honest with you, if we just nail every game of soccer, basketball, and American football that’s played, we’ll have, you know, the vast majority of what we need.
Unidentified speaker: Okay. Let’s shift gears a little bit here and talk about the media segment and FanHub.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Sure.
Unidentified speaker: Maybe just from a high level, what are some of the offerings within that that you’re most excited about, and how you think about the multi-year growth algorithm for the media segment?
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah, what I’m most excited about, and this is the thing that’s coming through, you’ll have seen it recently with an announcement we had at PMG, it’s bringing non-sports betting brands into our advertising business. Historically, our media business was built with sportsbooks and sportsbook partners, sports brands. Now, increasingly, it’s the big global brands. It’s Coca-Cola, it’s Peloton, it’s Gatorade, it’s the big players who have got a distinct and explicit strategy, which is they need to connect with sports fans for whatever reason they have. We’re now seeing that, with the technologies that we’ve developed, we’ve got a self-serve platform. We’re now starting to roll out into the agencies and, as well as into the actual marketing departments, we’re able to provide our marketers with the direct ability to buy a sports audience. The most exciting thing is we’re doing it across multiple different channels.
We’re doing it connected TV, obviously online, mobile, TV, ultimately in stadium as well. That evolution of that product is really exciting because we’ve got the ability to access any of the big global brands who want to talk to a sports fan and put them in front of people that we know are absolute sports fanatics at the moment that is the most high emotion for them, when a goal is scored, when the game’s about to start, when something’s happened on the pitch that is relevant to that fan. We can do that in a very, very direct fashion. That’s because, as I said, that’s something that we’ve sort of espoused for a while. I probably sort of talked about it last year when we were here. Now we are actually seeing real traction, real revenues. You might have seen our last quarter guidance.
We increased our guidance modestly I think last quarter. A lot of that’s coming because the media business is getting real traction and we’re starting to see some really strong growth from that, which is good and exciting.
Unidentified speaker: When you think about the opportunity from here, you talked about non-sportsbook advertisers, sports-adjacent advertisers, which I think makes a ton of sense. Is there still runway with your sportsbook partners as well from a media segment perspective? You talked about self-serve and channel mix. Are there other maybe like product unlocks as well to come that might help drive further adoption and wallet share?
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah, look, if you look at the sportsbooks, they very simply tend to split it into two goals. It’s either acquisition of new customers or it’s retention and remarketing to those customers. Our product does both those things. You will have sort of shifting sands a little bit, as you know, when a new state comes on board, it’ll be all the focus on that. When it’s back to profitability, you’ll want to re-engage. The sportsbooks will always be customers. I think it’s fair to say most of the deals we end up doing with the sportsbooks include marketing. It’s a, well, they’re just natural bedfellows.
Unidentified speaker: Yeah.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: The sports brands who want to talk to sports fans though is where, you know, the sort of stellar growth can really come from. I mean, you look at the size of, you know, some of the brand budgets for, you know, the guys who are looking to target sports fans. Increasingly, you know, you look at the noise that comes from the agencies. You look at the noise that comes from some of the tech players in the space. They’re all saying they want to access a sports audience. There aren’t very many companies who actually have the ability to do that. We’ve got the first-party data. We’ve got the actual data on the sport. We’ve got the distribution to, you know, those websites or, you know, connected TV or whatever medium it is. We’re able to marry those two things together in a really compelling way.
The best thing about it is it’s performance-driven. You know, we have to deliver. One of the reasons that we’re seeing such good growth there and the reason that the adoption is working so well is because people are actually getting really good results. They’re not just wasting money and hoping it’s delivering. We’re beating targets that we set and giving real visibility on it. It’s a, I think we’re in a fairly unique position to be able to deliver this. I’m super, super excited about it.
Unidentified speaker: You touched on it at the very beginning, in terms of the expanded partnership with the NFL.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yep.
Unidentified speaker: It does have a component of it that is related to FanHub and this media segment. How meaningful could that be, and what does that specifically look like mechanically, what that incremental relationship with the NFL looks like as it relates to FanHub?
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah, if you’re an agency or a major brand, what you’re looking for is, you know, reaching depth. It’s quite hard to find inventory. It’s a piece of the puzzle. It’s a very important piece of the puzzle because it gives you something at a specific time. The goal for us is to really expand our first-party data, expand where we’re able to distribute in order to fulfill. At the moment, we sold out of our inventory five minutes into launching a new product. Our focus as a business now is making sure that we’re creating new inventory, which again, through things like BetVision, where we’re owning and controlling the sort of interface that we were talking about, that’s advertising inventory for us. We can use that to drive growth, drive partners.
For us, it’s about driving that inventory up, which I think is quite a nice problem to have at the moment.
Unidentified speaker: Okay. Another big topic in the sports betting space is prediction markets or futures contracts. I’m curious just to get your worldview on the potential competitive impact from these prediction markets to your regulated sportsbook partners.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yep.
Unidentified speaker: from the futures contracts as it relates to sporting events.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah, I mean, look, I think there’s a big opportunity subject to regulation, right? You know, for those who know us, we’re very cautious from a regulatory point of view. The opportunity is very significant. Again, the regulatory environment has to be very clear there. I think from our point of view, we see the addition of players into the market, they all require the same data. They all need the data. They need the relationships. They need the access to the leagues. Again, that’s just for the revenue opportunities. We are watching the space pretty carefully. We are watching how the regulatory space evolves in that area as well. We can definitely see a scenario where that is a materially attractive sort of growth opportunity for us.
Unidentified speaker: In terms of partnering with those companies.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah, again, as I said, subject to how regulation shakes out, you know, in the end, if you want to be a player and you want to offer a sports betting product, it’s quite hard to do that, you know, for example, in the U.S. without the NFL. We have that product set, so it’s a big opportunity for us. We have to be mindful of the environment.
Unidentified speaker: Okay. Maybe just to, in the last few minutes here, just talk about the capital allocation priorities between investing back into the business. You know, you’re starting to scale free cash flow over time.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah.
Unidentified speaker: Between investing, M&A, what areas of M&A you might look for, and then returning capital to shareholders over time as well.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I mean, look, last year we developed that we had generated $82 million of free cash flow, which we decided to reinvest in the business. Again, as I said earlier, you’re really seeing results of that now coming through in the deals that we’re doing and the shape of the business. We’re feeling very good about our investment pace. I’m pretty happy with how much money we invest in the business, and I’m pretty happy with the ROI we’re getting from that. We are obviously looking at businesses. It’s no surprise to anyone. I think, to be honest with you, we looked at about 60 businesses in the last six to nine months from an acquisition point of view, but there’s nothing particularly that’s driving us.
One of the good things about us is we’ve invested so much historically and so much organically in our growth. We have a lot of what we need. For us to move the needle, the business has got to be accretive, cash generative. It’s got to not disrupt our margin. There’s a pretty high bar for M&A deals for us. We will continue to look at what’s available on the market. Again, we’re not screaming out for any particular technology. Our growth rate at the moment, 26%, is pretty good on an organic basis. We’re feeling pretty good about the business. If something becomes available that meets the criteria, then of course we’re very well positioned to do it. We’re not going to be doing M&A deals just for the sake of it.
Unidentified speaker: You have the, you know, you’re in a position now where you have most of your league relationships locked up.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Correct.
Unidentified speaker: A pretty long time. The kind of incremental margin path from here should be pretty healthy. The flow through to free cash flow should be pretty healthy. Those will come up for renewal at some point. How do you think about the balancing of what we’re going to allocate towards returning capital to shareholders over time versus ensuring that you have enough capital to invest in the business and/or for future deals when they come up for renewal?
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: Yeah, I mean, look, those deals are quite a long way away.
Unidentified speaker: Yeah.
Mark Locke, Co-Founder and CEO, Genius Sports: I mean, we’ve got the benefit of a fair bit of time. I think 2030 is kind of the magic number. The business on an organic basis has got a really clear growth trajectory. As you know, we’ve been pretty good at hitting and beating our numbers for the last 16, 17 quarters. I think we’ve probably bought enough credibility to say that we’ve got good visibility of the future and we know how the business is going to grow. At the moment, we’re focused on looking for the right M&A opportunities, as I said, looking at continuing to be prudent by investing at the right level in the business, rolling out the products stack that we’ve got and making sure that that’s getting good adoption.
I think the relationships that we have with those leagues when it comes to renewal in four or five years’ time, the business will continue to have made those investments in those partnerships. We should be very well placed to continue to do what we’ve always done and renew those deals and service our partners.
Unidentified speaker: Perfect. I think we’re at time. Please, everyone, join me in thanking Mark and the team from Genius Sports for being at the conference. Thank you very much.
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