Ivo Valenta: how Synot's gambling empire is eyeing the US

Synot gambling holding founder Ivo Valenta has told Forbes that a business which began as a dream of a pub with a couple of slot machines has grown into a billion-dollar empire operating in dozens of countries. After Latin America, the company has set its sights on conquering the US, and Valenta himself does not rule out that control of Synot could eventually pass out of the family's hands.

Valenta ranks 55th among the wealthiest Czechs, with a fortune of almost 13 billion crowns. He founded Synot in the early 1990s with his family — hence the name, from the Czech syn a otec, “son and father”. Today the holding supplies slot machines and online games around the world, and its name once featured in the title of the top football league in both Czechia and Latvia — Valenta even owned the club now known as “1. FC Slovácko”.

Despite his close ties to the football business, the entrepreneur admits he is completely indifferent to sport: he does not watch the World Cup and has never been much of a fan, even though Synot does rather well out of betting whenever favourites unexpectedly lose. He has openly advised Czech billionaires who have been buying up football clubs en masse in recent years not to bother — though he concedes that at least the money from such purchases stays in the country.

Besides gambling, the businessman also runs an education project — the Orbis Institute in Zlín, which includes a kindergarten, a primary school and a secondary school. The idea came about in 2014, when he returned to Czechia with his family from Monaco to run for the Senate and could not find a suitable language school for his children. The school recently acquired an unusual “pupil” — a humanoid robot worth more than a million crowns, which the children have nicknamed Orbi: for now it is operated by technicians, but within six months the robot is expected to learn to walk and talk on its own.

Synot nonetheless remains Valenta's life's work — a company whose headquarters in Uherské Hradiště are hung with logos and old slot machines, including the very one he brought back from Germany before the Velvet Revolution. The future of the holding — including a possible change of ownership — is precisely what lies at the heart of the interview.