Rush Street Interactive (RSI) has acquired Phil Galfond’s poker platform Run It Once (RIO), taking the European poker brand to the US market.
While the details of the deal are yet to be disclosed, RIO founder and professional poker player Phil Galfond said that the process of agreeing a deal took 18 months.
Under the deal, RIO will integrate its software into RSI’s platform.
“We spoke with many potential partners over the last 18 months and are very excited to be on team RSI,” Galfond said. “They share our values: Honesty, integrity, fairness, and transparency – and not only with their players. They stood out to me in the fair and honest way they dealt with us.
“RIO Poker created a platform that people loved, with features and innovations that the poker world was excited about, but we also heard things like ‘if only they could iterate on their software faster’ or ‘I’d move all my volume to RIO if they were bigger.’
“Well, now we are bigger – much bigger. And now we add to our existing tech team the expertise and experience of those who have built huge poker platforms in the past. I’m extremely excited about what we’ll be able to accomplish together.”
RSI co-founder and former chief executive Gregory Carlin recently resigned from his position on the board of directors and departed from the company entirely.
