Flows is building the gaming industry’s version of Zapier

Over the past few years, a quiet frustration has been building across the iGaming industry: teams have ideas, but they can’t get them out the door. When roadmaps are clogged and engineering resources are scarce, even simple product tweaks can take months. On this week’s BettingStartups Podcast, Flows CEO James King explained how that frustration became the impetus for his company—a platform built on a simple premise: operators should be able to build faster than their technology allows.

King said the concept for Flows struck after watching operators, suppliers, and affiliates repeatedly hit the same wall. “We were seeing operators being frustrated and not being able to get certain products to market fast enough,” he said. “Even the suppliers… knowing what they wanted to do, and yet again, not being able to do it fast enough.”

The three co-founders—King on the commercial side, Mike Broughton on technology, and Andrew Doublesin on product and integrations—eventually aligned around a shared goal: build a tool that gives teams the autonomy they don’t get from their existing tech stacks. “We need to build an innovation platform, a tool to allow companies and people to innovate at speed,” King recalled.

Flows launched in 2021 with a no-code automation engine that plugs into an operator’s real-time event stream (game spins, deposits, logins, payments) and lets non-technical teams create everything from triggers and workflows to full-blown products. “Off the back of these real-time events passing in, you are able to build in a really easy, user-friendly interface, which, in turn, become products,” King explained.

To many, the platform is reminiscent of the online automation tool Zapier, but King says Flows is built for a level of scale the former wasn’t designed for. “Real time volume in our space is hundreds of millions, billions of triggers daily… a tool like Zapier will fall over,” King said.

That flexibility has led to a surprising range of use cases. CRM teams run player journeys, risk teams build fraud- and bonus-abuse alerts, and product teams have created jackpots, bonus engines, and omnichannel loyalty systems entirely inside Flows. “We’ve had jackpots built, we’ve had bonus engines,” King said. “Omnichannel is a great use case,” noting that Flows can merge online and offline data into a single system.

The company is now deploying with major U.S. operators. King revealed that Flows recently went live with Fanatics via partner Light & Wonder. “We’ve just gone live with Fanatics… that was really kind of quick from concept through to delivery,” he said. “It has been a really kind of strong year of traction.”

That relationship deepened in 2024 when Light & Wonder became a strategic investor. King said the decision was less about capital and more about acceleration. “They can support you in some of these introductions as an investor,” he said. “On top of that, we had the added piece of them being a client of ours and we were building products that they… have since pushed to market.”

Despite operating deep in iGaming, King stressed that Flows is fundamentally a technology company. “We would always say that we’re a tech company in the gaming space versus the other way around,” he said. The platform is extensible to fintech or retail, but King emphasized that gaming alone remains a massive, barely tapped opportunity. “We are so tiny and we’ve captured the tiniest amount, so yeah—a big, big, big way to go.”

Looking ahead to 2026, King said Flows will continue scaling in North America and rolling out new products—including innovation around the emerging agentic-AI space. But the mission stays constant. “It will always be to the same core goal of empowering more people to innovate,” he said. “We want everyone and anyone to have a really awesome and wonderful thought and be able to build and act on that.”

Listen to the full podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.