How long do you spend per day on WhatsApp? If we are all completely honest, perhaps a little longer than we would want. But the Meta-owned instant messaging platform has surged in popularity over the last decade and now claims to have over 3.5 billion active users per month.

With around 100 billion messages sent per day with 83% of users logging on daily and spending over 30 minutes on the app per day, it is clear that WhatsApp is one of the most popular and trusted apps in the world. 

So why hasn’t the sports betting sector embraced it?

ChatBet is a new product borne out of this wider shift in consumer behaviour, allowing users to request and place bets all within a WhatsApp chat that acts as a UI on top of a sportsbook’s backend and PAM platform. 

Founded by Josh Swerdlow, ChatBet is being rolled out across Latin America where it is witnessing promising results for operators looking to improve retention rates and bolster conversions and, ultimately, margin.

Speaking to SBC News around the launch of ChatBet AI v3, Swerdlow said: “Why do I have to go into an app or a website? A bet starts with a conversation, continues with a conversation, and ends with a conversation. Conversations are all happening in messaging. So why can’t we do it there?”

What does ChatBet do?

ChatBet does exactly that, allowing players to tell a WhatsApp agentic AI chat the bet they would like to place. The AI solution does the rest, generating the bet, getting user confirmation then placing the bet within the sportsbook. The founder outlined that Chatbet allows operators to meet players exactly where they are, rather than just offering a UX improvement. 

“We’re adapting our product to the way users want to place a bet,” Swerdlow added. “We are taking how users naturally say it, understanding the intent, building the betslip, and then executing it via the operator because we’re a B2B platform.

“The operator still does what they do, which is the wallet, the KYC and the odds. We just sit as a layer on top as a new interface layer that allows them to be where the players are, which is in messaging apps.”

Swerdlow has spent the majority of his career working in the technology sector helping to build and scale businesses in VP Sales and Chief Revenue Officer roles with various mobile apps and SaaS businesses. 

He outlines that his varied experiences have equipped him with the knowledge of how to take intuitive and interesting ideas and turn them into successful businesses. With his partners in Colombia who develop the technology for ChatBet, Swerdlow is confident in recreating similar successes in sports betting.

“We’ve built operator platforms and we’ve built AI products. And we’ve built AI products for operators as well. My background is 20 years of taking ideas, productising them and then building and executing the go-to-market strategies. 

“I was connecting the dots from where the users came from to what they were doing in the app, and how much they were spending. Then I went to drive the users as well. So I’ve worked in all of the processes from everything to do with user journey.”

Swerdlow’s experience has given him unique insights into what drives user behaviour in the mobile sector, which explains his confidence in WhatsApp as a user acquisition and retention tool.

“For a player, it’s allowing them to do it naturally through conversation because that’s how they like to communicate,” he added.

Another advantage that Swerdlow has from his career experience is looking at sports betting with a fresh perspective. After working with casino and affiliate networks via a friend, he became more interested in iGaming and that’s when the idea for ChatBet was formed. 

But Swerdlow has noticed that the sector is somewhat hesitant to change from a technology perspective. 

“I understand why operators are cautious. There is a lot at stake in this industry, and no one wants to experiment with something that could disrupt their core business. That’s exactly why we built ChatBet to sit alongside the operator’s existing stack, not replace it. We adapt around their infrastructure, market, players and workflows, so they can be first to market with a new channel without taking unnecessary risk.

“We’re not asking operators to be guinea pigs. We’re giving them a proven way to be first movers, with a product built around their business, their stack and their players.”

How does ChatBet work?

With AI such a buzzword in 2026, it might be easy to underestimate the work going into developing products like ChatBet. First ideated three years ago, the solution was built in a menu form, where players would select the fixture, then the player, then the market, then confirming the bet. Swerdlow admitted that the funnel was far too long, so phase two of the project was to shorten it by

It was then developed into a WhatsApp chat where users would input multiple messages to get to a bet slip. Then the next challenge was to do that in as fast a process as possible. 

As Swerdlow explains, it was no easy feat.

“We had to build our own LLM for it to understand the context of, when it says ‘Liverpool’, what that means. Yes, it’s a city, we know that. But we’re referring to Liverpool FC. We wrote so much code for that, and then we had to write it for all of the abbreviations and nicknames for all the teams.”

However, ChatBet has rolled out across Latin America where it has regulatory clearances to do so and is yielding positive results. The solution has delivered a 2x of clients’ conversion rate, while uplifting average revenue per user by 22%.

But as AI moves quickly, ChatBet’s advantage is that it is already operating where the next generation of AI companies need to be: connected to real performance, revenue, CRM and intent data.

“The AI companies that win won’t just be the ones with the best demos,” Swerdlow explained. “They will be the ones connected to real commercial outcomes. That’s where we believe ChatBet is already ahead — we can see the ad, the conversation, the intent, the betslip, the wager and the revenue outcome.”

That feedback loop gives ChatBet a clear view of what drives conversion, what causes drop-off, and which users, markets and offers create value for operators.

“We watch the market closely and we test what else is out there,” Swerdlow added. 

“Competition is a good thing because it validates the category. But we also know the challenges we’ve already solved, and we believe we’re ahead of the pack. The focus now is to keep extending that lead with features that help operators convert, retain and reactivate players in smarter ways.”

As ChatBet continues to scale with multiple operators across Latin America, the company is positioning itself not just as a WhatsApp betting product, but as a performance layer for conversational betting.

To discover more about the impact of WhatsApp and Telegram betting through ChatBet, download this report.