Get ready to Rimble!

Shivam Shorewala thinks micro-betting on cricket and other niche sports will be an evolutionary boom for sports betting.

And the 25-year-old co-founder of Rimble thinks his company is going to be a major part of it.

Maybe it’s for the best that the squash thing didn’t work out.

Shorewala and Sehaj Chawla, who he’s known since kindergarten in Mumbai, India, founded Rimble in 2019 with an “original thesis” of building micro markets for esports. A global calamity made them even more certain they were on to something.

“Esports is meant to be consumed on our laptops, our phones. It allows for this two-way level of interaction that traditional sports might not have typically,” Shorewala told Betting Startups News. “Micro-markets are the best fit for that kind of experience.

“But while building that, we realized some of the core experiences for esports were kind of lacking. Whether it was player props, in-game parlays, some of the core betting experiences that you're very familiar with in the NBA, NFL, were absolutely missing for popular titles like League of Legends or Counter-Strike.”

So Rimble went to work on it. But there’s still more to do.

“It truly has not taken its full potential of this two-way interaction that we hope to take care of with the micro-markets within our building,” Shorewala said.

The path to Rimble began for Shorewala in Mumbai, where he built and “made a lot of money” building video games for mobile devices. Once the 38th-ranked squash player in India, he surrendered his collegiate athletic aspirations to an injury but plied his budding technical expertise into enrolling at Cal-Berkeley and studying computer science and business. Hired by the Simplebet sportsbook, he helped build horse racing and college football products before co-founding Rimble. Then the spark for what became the company’s thesis was struck.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of Shorewala’s friends became enamored with one of the few live sports events available: esports tournaments. 

Chawla, meanwhile, was having a correlating experience as he studied data science and machine learning at Cambridge and Harvard.

“He was also really sold on this idea during COVID because he was also consuming a lot of video game streams and watching tournaments,” Shorewala said. “So we thought we could really capitalize on this trend.”

And now comes cricket and kabaddi. Kabaddi?

“While we were selling our esports content to a lot of our clients, we had some clients in Asia who asked if we could recreate it for cricket, because there seems to be a lack of cricket data providers in the market,” Shorewala related. “While our thesis was, ‘Hey, we're going to stick with esports, we're just going to build it out for this niche,’ along the way came this opportunity of some alternative sports as well.”

Rimble was quickly able to construct same-game parlays and players props for both cricket and kabaddi, a niche Indian sport resembling a sort of freeze tag-meets-wrestling mash-up. 

Cricket, particularly, represents an untapped market, especially in the United States.

Cricket’s pace of play should be ideal for in-play betting, Shorewala said. Esports is an apt application, too, he said, although it’s much quicker.

“For cricket, the fit for micro-markets is even better because you can do something like a next ball because there's a one-minute gap between each ball,” he explained. “But for esports too, you can kind of try to figure out some sort of similar framework where instead of focusing on something like the next kill, you can do for Counter-Strike the next round. A round is a minute and a half.”

Rimble, which is currently bootstrapped and comprised of seven employees, provides analytics and historical odds to sportsbook clients for integration into their platform. They can use the information in its original form or to inform their own lines.

“We're sort of like a market maker,” Shorewala said. “We provide sportsbooks the initial ‘Team A is going to have X percentage to win and Team B is going to have Y percentage to win.’ So given that information, they can either take that as an input into their own trading team … or they could just do as-is and offer ours straight up and then move it according to market volumes.”

Rimble began with daily fantasy sports platforms Poly Play, the now-defunct Monkey Knight Fight, ParlayPlay and Vivid Picks as clients.

“We were with DFS operators to begin with because it's easy to break in as a startup and our player props were a natural fit,” Shorewala said. “But more recently we've started selling to some of the sportsbooks, especially in Europe, through some of our partners or with direct integrations, companies like Doxxbet, which are regulated money gaming sportsbooks in Europe.”

Shorewala hopes to have clients in the United States in the next few months. 

“I think historically [U.S.] sportsbooks have been focused on getting NFL, NBA, MLB, to the Tier 1 offerings that they have,” he said. “But now that a lot of them have kind of done the micros, done the same-game parlays, have pretty good pricing accuracy, esports and cricket and all alternative sports data should be next on their focus because that's what allows them to attract a new user base on their platform, allows them to lower their cap and cross-sell everything in their ecosystem.”