Winvia Entertainment Eyes London Stock Exchange for Expansion into UK Prize Draw Market

The company aims to place brand-new ordinary shares at £0.05 each, with the hope of raising approximately £40m overall. This money, entirely separate from existing shareholders’ contributions, would be used to widen their reach in the promising UK prize draw market, increasing brand equity and awareness.

Recent data indicates lucrative opportunities in the existing prize draw market. New user registrations reached around 763,000 in the first half of 2025, with 595,000 first-time players. This is a significant increase from 328,000 registrations and 200,000 first-time players in 2022.

Winvia has claimed that there is a “strong pipeline of potentially attractive M&A prospects” in the market, because of legacy platforms and operators struggling to scale at pace. It has recently acquired two companies: Best of the Best and Click Competitions.

Alongside these, Winvia owns Luck.com, Royal Slots and Princess Casino in Romania, as well as various white-label operations. This Romanian online gambling arm remains profitable, with new user registrations at one million for the first six months of 2025 and first-time depositors reaching 200,000.

In 2023, Winvia reported a gross revenue of £93m; this jumped to £153.2m for the year ending 31 December 2024. Gross profit also increased by over 65%, from £45.5m to £75.5m, with a pre-tax profit of £7m in 2024.

The goal is for the sustainable growth in Romania to continue funding inorganic growth while the prize draw arm becomes Winvia’s dominant division.

The team behind the plan to list on AIM is CEO Mihai Manoila, CFO David Perry – former head of Deloitte and BDO – and non-executive chair Joanne Bucci. Bucci has previously served as the chair of the Lotteries Council and the managing director of the People’s Postcode Lottery.

Manoila said, “An IPO would allow us to accelerate our growth strategy, specifically on the UK prize draw business where we see significant opportunities, both organic and inorganic, in a fragmented and fast-growing market where we can implement our technology platform.

“We look forward to taking the next steps on this journey and building on the work undertaken so far as we look to build a business with significant scale underpinned by our technology platform.”

With the McDonald’s Monopoly prize draw as popular as ever, and Omaze reporting a profit in the UK for the first time in five years of operation, it’s clear that the prize draw market offers an enticing opportunity for gambling operators. However, recent studies have shown a rise in problem gambling, especially in young people, in part due to these prize draws. It’s likely we will see regulators start to crack down and impose stricter regulations on these forms of gambling.