Week 09, 2023

Here's what we saw, heard, and read in the betting industry's early-stage ecosystem last week

Author

Betting Startups
February 27, 2023

Hey! So we decided to start numbering the issues based on the week of the year, thus welcome to the newsletter for Week 09, 2023.

Here’s what we’ve got for you:

📰 Headline news

  • US Integrity signs deal to provide monitoring services to Bellator MMA, helping protect against fraud, corruption, and irregularities. (Link)

  • Flows, the no-code innovation platform, was named Rising Star at the EGR Nordics Awards held in St. Julian’s, Malta. (Link)

  • Odds on Compliance announced that its PlaybookAI product has been released from beta and will formally launch on March 1st, helping to streamline compliance processes for the industry. (Link)

📚 Recommended reads

  • iGaming NEXT published a fantastic interview with Benjie Cherniak of Avenue H Capital to get his take on the current state of the market and industry. (Link)

  • SBC Americas talks to David Woodley from Playmaker to discuss on-site activations in Arizona during Superbowl 57 weekend. (Link)

  • iGaming Business spoke with the founders of Odds on Compliance, Low6, and Oxygia to get their predictions on technology and innovation in 2023. (Link)

  • Waterhouse VC dropped their February newsletter, which always offers an insight or two for startups in the space. (Link)

This week’s Recommended Reads are brought to you by our friends at Savage Sports:

SAVAGE SPORTSSports. Without the fluff.

🗓️ Industry event field notes

  • The annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is happening this week in Boston, and included on the program is the Startup Pitch Competition & Trade Show. Betting analytics startup ritthm has been selected as a finalist, as teased by co-founder & CEO Megan Lanham on Linkedin.

  • iGaming NEXT NYC is happening next week, and it includes a STACKED agenda of content from some of the industry’s leading people. Standard passes are now sold out (with a wait list being taken), but a limited number of VIP passes remain available. Editor’s note: we’ll be there!

🐦 Tweet of the week

Okay so this isn’t actually a recurring section of the newsletter… we just added it this week for our own self-serving interest, but here it is anyways:

🔍 Featured founder

In honor of Sunday’s entertaining fight between Jake Paul and Tommy Fury, this week’s featured founder is Joey Levy, co-founder of Betr.

Despite being only 28 years old, Joey is an industry veteran best known for pioneering the microbetting category as cofounder of Simplebet. He’s now back for another round as Jake Paul’s co-founder at one of the industry’s newest operators, Betr.

On his “holy shit moment”
When PASPA was repealed in May 2018, Joey and his cofounders at Simplebet decided to focus their startup on US sports. But their real moment of clarity was realizing that the cadence of US sports creates discrete betting opportunities in-game that happens to map to the broader consumer trend of shortening attention spans. Thus microbetting as we now know it was born. But that led Joey to discover a new problem: no incumbent suppliers could provide a microbetting product, at which point he and his cofounders concluded that Simplebet would focus on pursuing the B2B opportunity.

Partnering with The Problem Child
Simplebet is now firmly entrenched in the industry as supplier of microbetting products to operators such as DraftKings and Caesars. But Joey felt like he had unfinished business and still wanted to pursue his original vision of delivering an intuitive consumer betting experience to the masses. And to help get that product to the masses, he’d need reach - which led him to partnering with none other than Jake Paul, with his 70+ million followers. Thus Betr was born as a B2C brand and regulated operator, which went live in Ohio on January 1st.

Fundraising advice
Companies that Joey has founded have raised close to $100 million in cumulative funding, so he knows a thing or two about how to do it successfully. For entrepreneurs planning to fundraise in an uncertain economy (like now), Joey emphasizes the importance of financial discipline, and extending the runway as long as possible. He also urges them to establish credibility and be able to craft a compelling unit economics narrative, while maintaining transparency with investors at all times.

Hear Joey tell his full story on Ep. 54 of The Betting Startups Podcast.

🆓 The insanely cool free offer of the week

While scrolling Linkedin, we spotted this open offer from Matt Howard of Propus Partners to betting industry startups:

We have to reasonably assume that this is a limited time offer, so get in touch with Matt and his team ASAP if it sounds interesting.

You’re sure to get value from the exercise based on their depth of industry experience. Kudos, Matt! 👏

Alright, we’ll leave it there for this week.

Before we go, reminder to industry startups: add us to your PR contact list and spam send us your news links to share here! <[email protected]> ✌️