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# Mindway AI Leads Gambling Harm Detection for Operators
- URL: https://www.igamingnews.biz/mindway-ai-gambling-harm-detection/
- Published: 2026-09-01T06:24:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-01T06:26:23.000Z
- Description: Mindway AI, majority owned by affiliate group Better Collective, now runs gambling harm detection for DraftKings, PrizePicks and dozens of other operators.
- Author: iGamingNews Editorial Desk
- Tags: Analysis, Responsible Gambling, Regulation, Technology

*Image credit: illustration, iGamingNews Editorial Desk. Source: company announcements and Dutch regulator sanction decisions. Never imply stock depicts the actual event.*

**Mindway AI, the gambling harm detection company majority owned by affiliate marketing group Better Collective, added DraftKings on January 5, 2026 and PrizePicks on October 1, 2025, extending its behavioral monitoring to 14.7 million active players a month across more than 65 jurisdictions.** Those two deals, both confirmed in company announcements, mean one vendor now screens risk for two of the largest sports betting apps in the United States.

The number that matters sits behind that scale: the Netherlands' Kansspelautoriteit issued a binding order against bet365's local licence holder in November 2025 and fined a second operator, 711 B.V., 886,000 euros in June 2026, both for failing to do by hand what Mindway AI and its main rival now sell as software. Regulators are no longer treating manual account review as adequate. That is turning a compliance function every operator used to run in-house into a market with a small number of suppliers.

## Gambling harm detection runs through two vendors

Mindway AI is not new. Better Collective, the Copenhagen-listed affiliate group behind sites feeding traffic to sportsbooks worldwide, took a 19.99% stake in the Danish firm in 2019 and exercised an option to reach majority ownership on January 1, 2021, according to the company's own announcement. Its products, GameScanner and Gamalyze, use behavioral data and a short simulated card game to flag players showing signs of losing control, rather than relying on self-reported questionnaires.

The scale grew fast once large US operators signed on. PrizePicks, which says it operates in more than 45 jurisdictions, adopted GameScanner on October 1, 2025\. "By enhancing our ability to analyze behavioral data, we're able to deliver more tailored interventions," said Phil Sherwood, PrizePicks' senior director of responsible gaming, in the companies' joint release. DraftKings followed three months later, integrating Mindway's Gamalyze tool into its Responsible Gaming Center. "Promoting informed decision-making to our customers is central to how we engage with them," said Lori Kalani, DraftKings' chief responsible gaming officer, in the January 5 announcement. Mindway says an August 2020 test by testing lab Gaming Laboratories International found GameScanner identifies at least 87% of the at-risk cases a human expert would catch, a company claim rather than an independently repeated audit.

Mindway's main competitor sits inside a different kind of company. OpenBet, the sports betting platform and trading-services supplier, bought the Vienna-based responsible-gambling firm Neccton on June 13, 2023, while OpenBet was still part of the Endeavor group. OpenBet has since changed hands itself: its management completed a $450 million buyout from Endeavor on March 24, 2025, making it an independent company again under chief executive Jordan Levin. Neccton's AI system, branded Mentor, was already running at Rush Street Interactive, the first US operator to adopt it, in July 2022, well before OpenBet owned it. This publication [covered the broader shift toward AI-run player protection](https://www.igamingnews.biz/ai-responsible-gambling-tools-2026/) when it first became standard practice; what has changed since is which two companies actually built the models operators are now buying rather than building in-house.

## Regulators stopped accepting paperwork

The Netherlands has issued the clearest signal of why operators are paying for this. The KSA ordered Hillside New Media Malta, which trades as bet365, to strengthen its duty of care on November 13, 2025, after finding the operator relied on player-completed questionnaires to judge affordability between December 2024 and June 2025, rather than verified financial evidence. Dutch rules require an affordability check once monthly net deposits pass 300 euros for players aged 18 to 23, or 700 euros for players 24 and older; the KSA found bet365's checks were not being triggered or calculated correctly. Hillside objected. The KSA rejected the objection, making the order final.

Seven months later, the same regulator fined convenience-store gambling brand 711 B.V. 886,000 euros for comparable failures spanning February 2022 to June 2024\. Reviewing ten player files chosen because they showed heavy losses, frequent play or late-night sessions, the KSA said it found violations in every one: the operator "did not properly analyze user gambling behavior and did not take the correct measures to intervene," in the regulator's own wording. [The KSA has separately published research](https://www.igamingnews.biz/netherlands-ksa-young-adult-gambling-data/) showing young-adult accounts behave differently from the assumptions operators had been using to build those manual reviews in the first place, which is part of why the old approach kept failing its own audits.

Finland is applying the same logic before its market even opens to competition. Its new Gambling Act obliges operators to detect harmful play early and intervene, and national operator Veikkaus rolled out OpenBet's Neccton platform in June 2026 to meet it ahead of the country's 2027 liberalization. The UK has run a comparable version of this argument for longer, through the Gambling Commission's customer-interaction rules and the [financial risk checks now moving through a phased rollout](https://www.igamingnews.biz/financial-risk-checks-uk-bettors-explained/). Three regulators, three different legal instruments, the same underlying complaint: a compliance team reading account histories by hand cannot keep pace with millions of active players, and enforcement now proves it in fines and binding orders rather than warnings.

## The affiliate company inside the compliance stack

What makes Mindway AI's position unusual is who owns it. Better Collective's core business is paid traffic: it runs sites that route bettors to sportsbooks and, [as this publication has reported](https://www.igamingnews.biz/better-collective-prediction-market-cpa/), collects revenue on a cost-per-acquisition basis when a referred player signs up. Through Mindway AI, the same corporate parent also builds the model that decides which of those referred players is showing signs of harm. Better Collective's public materials describe Mindway AI as operating independently within the group, and nothing here suggests the model is being tuned to suit the parent's acquisition business. But an affiliate network that earns on volume now also sells the software several of its own referral partners use to decide when to slow that volume down, and no public audit currently tests whether that arrangement holds up under pressure.

OpenBet carries a parallel version of the same structure. It sells sportsbooks the trading and platform technology that prices and settles bets, and through Neccton it also sells the tool that flags when a customer of that same platform is betting too much. Two companies, each with a direct commercial stake in how much people gamble, now build a meaningful share of the industry's harm-detection layer. Operators without the scale to build their own models are choosing between them, which means a small number of vendors, not each operator's own compliance team, increasingly define what "at risk" looks like across otherwise competing sportsbooks.

## A shared vendor now sets the industry's risk threshold

None of this makes the tools ineffective, and regulators pushing operators toward better detection is, on its own facts, a win for player protection. But when DraftKings and PrizePicks buy their risk model from the same supplier, and that supplier's parent company is paid to bring players in the door in the first place, the definition of "risky play" stops being something each operator sets independently and becomes something a handful of vendors set for the whole market. That concentration deserves the same scrutiny regulators are currently pointing at operators, not a pass because the software wears a safer-gambling label.