A startup’s journey is hardly ever easy. Not only must startups challenge the established players in the industry, but they also face fierce competition from peers pursuing the same path.

Yet success awaits those who get it right, which is why Wager Games was recognised at the First Pitch competition during SBC Summit Americas 2025.

As the industry continues to evolve alongside technology, new challenges are constantly emerging for the provider.

For co-founders Anuj Tomar, Ben Levitt and Kelson Quan, the past year has been less about chasing growth for growth’s sake and more about listening to customers, identifying new problems and building technology to solve them.

From First Pitch winner to global reach

As engagement becomes more challenging for the gaming industry, and most others, Wager Games embarked on a mission to improve that through creator-led content. It developed a platform that allows operators to embed personalised betting content directly into their products, helping users discover bets, engage with creators and spend more time inside the sportsbook.

Still, that is only the tip of the iceberg, and, according to Levitt, the business quickly expanded beyond that initial vision.

“When we stepped onto that stage, we were a company that had a single product,” he explains. “Today we’re a multi-product company.”

As a customer-first business, Wager Games took note of the operators’ increasing demand around personalisation, AI and customer engagement. That’s why they have expanded from offering video-native content tools to delivering AI-powered discovery products, data layers and personalised content experiences throughout the player journey.

The expansion has also gone beyond the sportsbook segment.

“We really came into this industry focused on sports betting,” Levitt says. “The more time we’ve spent in the industry, we’ve just seen how important the iGaming experience is.”

And the more time the company has been around, the more recognition it gains, and winning the contest in 2025 helped accelerate conversations that were already underway and gave the startup valuable credibility in front of larger operators, says Quan.

“We had an inkling there was an opportunity here,” he recalls. “After First Pitch happened, we grew probably three, four times from a revenue perspective.”

The company signed additional customers, secured larger partnerships and expanded its product offering as operators increasingly approached Wager Games with new requests.

Not only further clients approached the company, but also new frontiers opened up. Levitt notes that they used to be focused largely on the US and Canada going into the contest, and now have established relationships across Europe, Africa and Latin America.

“The international recognition of SBC helped us as we decided our technology was ready for the rest of the world,” he explains.

Scaling without losing the startup mentality

In new relationships, the customer-first culture Wager Games has can be key to turn them into long term deals. 

As the business scales, maintaining that approach can be a challenge, but one of the company’s core philosophies is what Quan describes as a client’s “favourite vendor.”

“The hardest part about scaling is how to keep delivering that great service as you’re getting more customers,” he says.

How? For Wager Games it looks like maintaining a startup mentality helped. That way, the team tackles each problem individually and thoroughly, getting the best results possible.

Levitt explains that as Wager Games has launched more products and supported more customers, it has developed repeatable processes and playbooks that make onboarding, deployment and long-term support significantly smoother.

Even though the company has evolved and now works in several different fronts, engagement remains a top priority for Wager Games. And what could be more important for engagement if it’s not personalisation?

Sometimes only seen as a buzzword, it could be a pillar of a successful operation if addressed properly.

Quan believes recent advances in machine learning have fundamentally changed what operators can achieve.

“The reason personalisation has been talked about so much is because it has always mattered,” he says. “What’s changed is the technology behind it.”

Machine learning models are helping them make the most of user interests, interactions and engagement patterns to build behavioural models.

However, Quan warns that “you can build the wildest personalisation engines, but if the customer doesn’t use it, it doesn’t matter what technology you implement.”

Instead, Wager Games is taking data from user behaviour and “trying to figure out the best piece of content to show a user that’s going to make them convert.”

The next steps

Going into the future, Wager Games is entering its next phase of growth, which goes beyond just content provision. As technology enthusiasts, Levitt explains they are “having a great time working with clients to figure out things that actually move the needle on the journeys they care the most about.”

With global growth happening and new markets opening, Wager Games is no longer a US business, but an international company. However, it is also crossing inter-segment borders, taking its engagement driving features from the sportsbook segment into online casinos.

“Casinos are a significant focus area for us right now because we believe the same personalisation and engagement benefits our customers are seeing in sports betting can create substantial value there as well. We’re already beginning to work with more casino operators, which opens up entirely new opportunities for growth,” Quan says.

One year after winning First Pitch, Wager Games may have expanded its products, markets and ambitions, but its core objective remains the same: helping operators create experiences that keep players engaged in a rapidly changing digital world.