What's new with Linemate

“What’s New” is a series dedicated to featuring past guests of The Betting Startups Podcast, where we check in on how things have been going since the podcast. This edition of What’s New features Linemate, which appeared on Ep. 103 of the podcast in February 2024.

Calvin Konya was tapping out some biographical notes for the NEXT Summit New York when right there on the screen it became apparent just how far the company he co-founded and leads as CEO has come.

Since its founding in 2023, Linemate has grown from a part-time project for Konya, his brother Matt, Dimitre Bogdanov and Johnson Ta into the SBC First Pitch Competition 2023 winner and what they hope will be the “Expedia of sports betting.”

No flights, no rental cars, but sports betting research for those shopping for it.

“Linemate has really been designed from Day One to be top-of-funnel discovery. So it's helping everyday sports fans navigate, discover content, find their way to getting in on the action in a very complex world,” Konya told Betting Startups News. “Look at the amount of ways to play that have been created. You've got traditional betting, fantasy, peer-to-peer, you've got exchange, and it's only growing. And then within that, you have thousands of team player props.

“And I think it wouldn't be fair to assume that the everyday sports fan would know how to navigate their way through that at onset. So that's really the way we positioned ourselves, which is why we made our app free to download. And all content is accessible for free.”

A subscription service is available for more advanced or motivated players, said Konya, who previously shared the Linemate origin on an episode of the Betting Startups podcast.

Konya expects to field questions about Linemate’s affiliate component at NEXT, considering the general flogging that facet of the gambling ecosystem has suffered in North America the last two years. His stance on it has been the same from the outset.

“My thought process is actually quite clear on this, which is I know a lot of our competitors that are behind paywall focus on depth analytics to beat the sportsbook, so why try to then incorporate the sportsbook within that ecosystem when it's designed to beat them? So for me, that makes a ton of sense. But our positioning is different,” he explained. “My vision for our company -  it may not come through right now in the app, but it's very clear for our team - it's that top-of-funnel discovery element. If we're helping everyday sports fans that want to adopt this behavior in terms of betting that want to get in on the game and can't understand how, and we're helping them do that, it organically makes sense that we're then also helping them find the best place to play. They're going to transact somewhere.”

Linemate, which is available in 117 countries and boasts 130,000 active monthly and 35,000 daily users, remains lean and nimble, having been a full-time venture for the founders only in the past year. The company became profitable in 2024 despite no outside funding, and made “strategic” alliances, Konya said, by joining the Sportradar Accelerator Program. That helped in building and testing a quality beta without incurring outside costs.

While its name is a clever wordplay on sports betting parlance and the founders’ Montreal roots and hockey fandom, the site now offers intelligence on 14 sports, with another market due next week.

Business collaborations with family and friends can make for an eventually awkward muddling of relationships, but Konya said his three-year venture with brother Matt has been rewarding. He calls his brother, a childhood soccer teammate and golf partner - when the weather allows - “the DNA of the product.”

“The more meaningful (relationship) has been the one between Matt and I as brothers,” he said. “We’ve actually gotten to learn a lot about ourselves that we didn’t know in a professional setting. We knew we came from different industries, but we didn't realize we actually had completely different personalities behaviorally, the way we see business and topics. And I think what's really interesting, we decided not to shun each other on the way we looked at things, but actually just use it to our advantage.”

So what if in New York, hustling to or from the NEXT conference Konya were to overhear one of these prospective Linemate customers querying a competitor about their product? What would be his elevator - or escalator - pitch?

It’s not his style to interject, he said. And he embraces competition on multiple levels. But he might have a thought.

“My thought bubble would be, if they're trying to find their way, then they should come to us,” he said. “I think we're building something a little different here. I think we're building it for that everyday fan that's really just starting out, can graduate into more depth, for sure, but that's where my thought bubble would be, is where is this individual actually sitting on that sort of spectrum of point A to point Z?”

Somewhere in need, he hopes, of the Expedia of sports betting.