Kero Sports: A whitelabel providing instant gratification that mirrors slots in sports betting setting

Kero Sports’ recent success at SBC Summit First Pitch event brought a lot of attention to the hot B2B startup, and deservedly so. A provider of whitelabel micro betting solutions, Kero Sports creates a more slot-like experience that is accessible to sports fans who do not bet on sports today. In our conversation, company CEO and Co-founder Tomash Devenishek outlined how sports betting can often be a complicated activity for new entrants and the way the company solves this problem.

It’s Kero’s mission to make sports betting more accessible by making it more akin to apps like TikTok and Instagram instead. There is much to unpack in this interview, and we welcome you to give a read to find out about one of the most promising startup companies in the industry.

Q1: Tomash, it has been a busy couple of weeks, we presume. How do you feel to have won the SBC Summit First Pitch Award?

It felt great to win the award because many incredible companies have pitched and won previously. I am very proud of my team and me to be included in the list of winners of such a competitive award. We are a young B2B company with a minimal marketing budget, so this type of recognition and awareness for our work adds an incredible boost from a brand and marketing angle.

Q2: Can you tell us a little more about Kero Sports and what you think made the company the judges' choice?

In short, we’re a whitelabel micro-betting provider. Our focus is on building proprietary algorithms that ingest real-time play-by-play sports data and output curated in-game micro-betting markets every 30 seconds. This helps our clients deliver an instant gratification betting experience which mirrors slots within the sports betting context more than any other product available today.

I think the judges understand the macro dynamics in the industry and share our view on micro-betting being one of the largest expansion opportunities. Our traction as a business also helps because we’re growing rapidly. We’ve grown our sales 300% YoY and are closing some incredible deals with global operators to deliver our technology to their users. So in sum, I think it was a combination of vision, market opportunity and macro environment.

Q3: Innovation is constantly happening around us, but it is definitely not a given. How do you manage to find new ways to create value-added products that buck existing trends?

I actually think that sports betting is one of the least disrupted industries. This isn’t to say that innovation doesn’t exist, because there are so many smart people doing incredible innovation in the space. But as a mass product, sports betting has not seen the same disruption dynamics that you can find in other places like content, social, streaming, stock trading, food delivery, etc. Most innovation has gone into improving what is already there. For example, same game parlays. Great product, but it improves incrementally on what is already there and doesn’t shift the paradigm.

So to answer your question directly, I think a great source of inspiration for how to innovate in the industry can and should be consumer trends outside of it. Today’s sports betting caters to bettors, not consumers and I believe that there’s great value in unlocking it for the masses. We tend to look at how people use digital technology in general. The overwhelming adoption vector is pointing towards three things; instant gratification, social, and most importantly mindless consumption. The last part is very important, the most popular apps today require almost no user effort with the exception of swiping their thumb. Sports betting isn’t like that. There is a lot of squinting required to scroll through complex spreadsheet views and lots of cognitive ability needed to figure out and compare probabilities in your head to try and pick one wager over another. In that sense, sports betting is a lot more similar to poker than it is to slots. We want to make it more like slots.

Our goal is to remove as much user skill and effort as possible by being able to figure out "What is contextual within the game right now and engaging as a bet for this user?" and then deliver that to them every 30 seconds so they only have one choice to make and don’t need to do anything except a swipe left or right in order to make a bet.

Q4: How important are live experiences for sports fans these days and does betting necessarily play a part in it?

Betting is an inherent part of watching any game and is a conduit to greater engagement with that sport. Modern society is not only used to but expects constant stimulation. Anytime someone is bored, they can open their phone and go to Twitter or TikTok to find dopamine. Sports don’t nearly deliver the same consistency of dopamine during a 2-hour game. So instant betting solves some of these challenges and our technology has figured out the best way to draw someone in, not for the next 2 hours, but for the next 2 minutes. Then within that 2 minutes, we have 3-4 additional opportunities to get 2 more minutes of your attention span and so on. This is what I mean when I compare what we provide to a casino product. It’s a constant cadence of dopamine with the same mechanics that slots have of easy-to-use, sticky entertainment form factor.

Q5: What is the greatest challenge you have encountered so far with Kero Sports since the company was launched?

We productized our technology over the last two years by working with pro sports teams across every major league in the US, deploying it as a free-to-play module within the team’s apps. The biggest challenge was to break through the perception that we are a free-to-play provider. Operators and investors alike looked less at what we do and more at where we were doing it. We constantly had to explain that free-to-play was and continues to be a great source of innovation and data but not the end game for our business and product. By virtue of being able to offer our tech to thousands of fans of major league teams every game, we’ve created incredible algorithms that automate contextual micro-betting across all the major league sports (soccer, basketball, football, hockey and baseball). This gave us a fantastic flywheel of; concept > users > product > data > learning > automation > monetization.

To date, we have had over 5 million bets made by ~100,000 users on our platform across these sports and that number is rising fast. So free-to-play will always continue to be a parallel focus for us because of the compounding structural effects and value this product line offers to our business and by extension our real money gaming clients. But the challenge remains in terms of having to convince people that FTP is a value add not vice versa and that our product can help real money operators create competitive product advantages and much bigger addressable audiences for their brands.

Image credit: Kero Sports