In its second iteration at this year’s G2E, the G2E Innovation Challenge is an opportunity for early-stage companies to engage the global gaming industry at Global Gaming Expo with live pitches in front of a distinguished panel of judges who included Lloyd Danzing, Managing Partner at Sharp Alpha Advisors; Adam Bates, Vice President at SuRo Capital; Edward King, Co-CIO and Managing Partner at Acies Investments; and Chris Grove, Managing Partner at Acies Investments. As we approach the end of the year, G2E sat down with this year’s winners to ask them about their experience competing in this year’s challenge and reflect on how their win is influencing their future.
G2E News: 2022 Innovation Challenge Reflection with Sparket and Betscope
Audience Choice Winner: Aaron Basch, Co-Founder, Sparket
Sparket has created The Social Betwork™, "a bet on anything event" wagering platform built for modern and novice users. Our vision is to help businesses and sportsbook operators differentiate their sports betting product offering, attract a broader demographic, and drive down user acquisition cost. We do this through our customizable platform, which focuses on wagering with your community rather than against the house and offering new and exotic bet and event types to underserved niche audiences. We are poised to add a new layer to existing sportsbooks and help grow the revenue pie for the sports betting industry in the U.S.
After recently earning our GLI-33 certification and partnering with Station Casinos, we were excited about sharing our progress with the gaming world. Participating in the G2E Innovation Challenge was a great opportunity to capitalize on our recent traction and find innovative partners who are looking to acquire and retain a new and broader demographic of customers.
The opportunity that G2E gave us with the Innovation Challenge and winning the audience vote was an incredible experience. The victory validates both our ideas to help expand the content and betting styles within the industry and proves that we have an audience excited about our product. We have had several follow ups with interested clients and gained investors since G2E and have more exciting announcements coming in the near future.
We are looking forward to attending next year’s G2E. As we continue to expand our partnerships, we want to be able to share our business and product growth at the top industry conference in the U.S. We are looking forward to meeting new clients and networking more within the space. Most importantly, we are excited about updating the community on our progress and experiences from all the new partnerships, which will be live by next year's show.
Judges Choice Winner: Colin Davy, Founder, Betscope
Betscope is a sports betting tool designed to help bettors find the most profitable bets that match their general beliefs on how they think a game will go. It’s a combination of an odds comparison tool, a correlations engine showing the relationships between all the bets in a game, and a bet value calculator that surfaces the most profitable bets that correlate with a bettor’s beliefs across all markets.
Visibility in the sports betting ecosystem was our number one goal in participating in this year’s Innovation Challenge. From my time at Fantasy Labs and the Action Network, I recognized how important it is to have a solid top of the funnel for user acquisition, and that has historically been one of our deficiencies at Betscope. While we have some name recognition, it’s not nearly as large as others. Our other main goal was validation of our proof of concept. We’re entirely self-funded and didn’t have to go through the vetting process associated with fundraising, so we felt slightly in the dark on whether we had something worth our time and effort.
Being the Judges Choice Winner was an incredibly encouraging sign that we’ve built something that has great potential. It’s a validation of the long hours my co-founder and I have put into this business and an encouraging sign of a clear path forward for how we can produce a meaningful impact in this space.
The doors it has opened so far have been great. The advisory panels have provided some much-needed guidance in areas where we’re not necessarily proficient as first-time entrepreneurs, and the connections we’ve made with other companies have introduced us to a thriving community trying to do some smart and cool things in the space. It’s been really rewarding to be a part of that ecosystem after going it largely alone to date and I’m looking forward to becoming even more ingrained in the space as we continue.
I’ve seen how successful partnerships breed more successful partnerships, so I’m looking forward to coming back to G2E in 2023. We’ll have solid data on what does and doesn’t work for Betscope and we’ll know its role in the sports betting ecosystem. We have a ton of ideas on how our product can bring a lot of value not just to individual bettors, but to operators and people in content and media as well. We’re really looking forward to working with them all once we find the right partners.
One of the things that struck me was how many people already seem to know each other, and how difficult it is to break into that circle when you’re coming in from the outside. Now that we have some more viable inroads, I’m looking to coming back with our vision of providing a different experience to sports bettors that will help them have more fun, feel smarter, and win more.