Vor Interactive is designing widgets for the everyday sports fan

At Vor Interactive, the UK-based sports data company Richard Acosta co-founded, he and his team have built predictive algorithms that generate thousands of data points per match across traditional sports and esports. But the business isn’t selling to professional bettors—they’re building tools for affiliates and operators to convert the everyday sports fan into users. 

“Our software builds marketing narrative boxes automatically,” Acosta explained on the podcast. “We wanted to ultimately build an innovative and interactive banner ad… the user can play around with it… click around it, have a look at potential returns, have a look at probability percentages as well.”

That’s the pitch behind Vor Turbo, the company’s first interactive widget. The product is already live with Odds Shark on an MLB campaign and another affiliate in Italy—Acosta says they plan to launch with ten "prominent” U.S. affiliates by the NFL season. “Early numbers we're getting through look very promising,” he added.

And in a world where supplier integrations can take several months, Acosta promises his widget can be live within 48 hours. “We wanted to make it as less technically demanding as possible, and I think we've managed that—literally anyone can use it.”

Vor’s data infrastructure powers much of this. The company generates first-party predictive data through its own machine learning models—originally developed for soccer and now expanding to cover major U.S. sports ahead of the NFL season. 

The company bootstrapped its way to this point and is now close to closing its first seed round. Acosta believes coming from outside iGaming helped shape the product—and investors think so too. “I think a lot of [investors] have found the product we've built to be pretty refreshing as well, because we're maybe not building the same stuff that everyone's used to,” he said.

Still, entering the space came with its hurdles. “You're not really taken seriously in the iGaming industry until people have seen you around for a couple of years,” Acosta said. Now after two years, that’s starting to ease up, and industry peers are more willing to open doors and give the startup more time. “It makes a big difference having [a product] rather than just talking about it.”

As NFL season approaches, Acosta is focused on momentum, but not at the cost of sustainability. “My real goal is to keep us as lean as possible while still allocating enough funds to scale up,” he said. “I certainly think within the next three to five years we can really see some serious growth and penetration in the market.”

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