Simplebet CEO on the future of sports betting

Chris Bevilacqua, Simplebet CEO, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss how the company is changing the sports betting landscape and their partnership with FanDuel.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. The word engagement is thrown around so long. In our industry media, it's about consumer engagement. In sports and sports betting, it's about fan engagement. And one person who knows this better than anybody is the CEO of Simplebet, Chris Bevilaqua, who joins us now to talk about what Simplebet is doing, how you and I may be engaging with them and partnerships they have, for instance, with companies, like FanDuel. Welcome to the show, and how does this work?

CHRIS BEVILACQUA: Well, thanks for having me, Adam. Happy holidays to you and the rest of the crew. You know, Simplebet, we are a B2B company, right? So we're an enterprise software solution that has made a major investment into machine learning and automation. And we are powering the future of fan engagement and sports betting. And so the first deal that we had is with FanDuel, as you referenced. And we actually took our technology and embedded it with our own user interface and FanDuel's app.

And so the game is called play action. And you can bet-- you go on the FanDuel's app, look for the play action game, and bet on every play and every drive in the NFL games. And it's been, you know, a really remarkable product rollout. We've had it up for about 13, 14 weeks now. And this past weekend, we had users betting 78 times on average for the Sunday slay games. They were on the app for-- 28% of them were on the app for an hour or more. So it's a really sticky engaging experience.

- You know, Chris, I think this B2B enterprise software space is so interesting, especially when you're tying it to sports betting. Can we kind of dive in a little bit deeper here and make it a bit more tangible? You just mentioned, then, kind of average number of bets during a game. Walk me through it from a user perspective and also a business perspective.

CHRIS BEVILACQUA: Yeah, now, so, you know, when we're talking about those amount of bets and bet velocity, right, when you're offering what we offer, it's really the first of its kind called what we call micromarkets and microbetting. So in other words, you can bet on every play and every drive in an NFL game or every pitch or every at bat in a baseball game or every shot or every possession in an NBA game. And those are all bets that are created, suspended, repriced, and resulted all in a matter of minutes and seconds. And it occurs as the game is going on in real time.

So we've essentially taken two and three-hour football, baseball, and basketball games. And we've chopped them into hundreds of thousands of many games during the game throughout the course of an entire season.

ADAM SHAPIRO: I'm sitting here trying to imagine the kind of computing power that a partner would need, because with that kind of micro betting, I would imagine the growth potential is enormous.

CHRIS BEVILACQUA: Yeah, I mean, so what in the FanDuel example I was just giving you on play action, that is a free-to-play game. So you sign up FanDuel, and you play for tokens. And at the end of every single quarter of every NFL game, you can win cash prizes if you have won the most tokens in that quarter. So that's really a, you know, a fan engagement, very sticky product, right, that media companies and sports betting companies want to use because they want to attract customers to interact with their IP for longer periods of time.

On the real money betting side, we're taking that exact same product, right? And we're licensing it to real money betting operators that offer that same exact betting experience, but you do it for real money. And that's where we make our significant revenue because of the volume of betting opportunities there are even if there's small lower amount bet limits over the course of millions of markets, right? I just mentioned football, baseball, basketball. We have 2 and 1/2 million markets already available.

ADAM SHAPIRO: It's a deep breath, then, because I'm thinking about the potential as you know, gaming-- electronic gaming. And perhaps sports betting on that is coming our way as well. But Chris Bevilaqua is the CEO of Simplebet. We appreciate you joining us right now.