I don’t know exactly how these companies make their money and how successful they are, but I at least believe all of them are in the odds computation business. They might be supplying prices to bookmakers instead of betting themselves etc.
Longshot Systems
Football Radar
Gambit Research
SportsRadar
Odds Reactor
Star Lizard
Smartodds
Smarkets
These companies are known more for their HFT trading in financial markets, but I believe they have also expanded into sports betting.
jane street
jump trading
Susquehanna
Also some of the bookmakers such as matchbook have started as betting group and then overtime turned into a bookmaker as that is where the real money is.
In Europe bookies just get rid of good players, except for the exchanges and Pinnacle. No one serious will gamble with European bookmakers. Though maybe this has changed lately. I have not been following field recently.
In Asia the bookies are a lot more tolerant, especially the larger ones. You really have to hit their pnl hard for you to get cut off.
I doubt there is a strong link between the founders of my old employer and Benter or Woods. My old employer did totally different kind of betting. No blackjack or horses.
In general people overestimate how hard it is to make money in gambling. You don't need to be some kind of savant to do it. The people in general are similar to what you would find in your average tech company. Sure there is a founder with a vision and some sort of an insight into making money, but every company has one.
People are mythologising making money by gambling. In terms of tech the industry is like 20 years behind the financial markets.
Source, I worked at company that did arbitrage in online sports betting in 2010s that employed around 30 or so people and did hundreds of millions in profit.
You can hire people into consultancy business and grow it like any other business. Sure it won't become the next magnificent seven, but you can grow it enough that you can make a lot of money.
For example, there exist plenty of consultancy companies that have 10million revenue. That would be 20x growth for us. In practice that would mean 500k - 1m yearly income for founders in our case. On top of that the company probably could be sold for 30m - 100m.
With typical vc dilution founders need to grow a very successful product company to earn similar amounts of money. There are plenty of examples of unicorn exits where the founder team has made less.
Yeah I have been wondering this myself as well. I'm one of 3 co-founders in a bootstrapped company doing consultancy for a few years in a LCOL area. We have been paying founders 50k/year salaries for the life of the company. We haven't been especially lucky and we haven't been super brilliant in our business decisions. Yet we are doing fairly well.
This year we made 400k revenue, 150k profit and 40% growth. Our sales prospect are a lot better than at the start of the year. So I'm expecting to have another strong year of growth next year. Also we are nowhere near saturating the market and can have strong growth for many years to come.
Salary + 1/3 of profits is equal to 100k for this year. 40% growth doubles the company every 2 years, If everything goes well just salary + profits will grow very nicely. Then on top of this come the exit opportunities where founders will make millions.
Longshot Systems Football Radar Gambit Research SportsRadar Odds Reactor Star Lizard Smartodds Smarkets
These companies are known more for their HFT trading in financial markets, but I believe they have also expanded into sports betting.
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Also some of the bookmakers such as matchbook have started as betting group and then overtime turned into a bookmaker as that is where the real money is.