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BETBY – Never Satisfied

By - 7 January 2025

Relatively speaking, BETBY hasn’t really been around that long. CEO Leonid Pertsovskiy reflects on a business journey that has seen the supplier go from relative unknown to significant industry player within a matter of years.

Being able to sign a deal with a renowned brand ambassador at the prime of his career is no small feat. As a co-founder of the business, you’re perfectly positioned to explain: just how far has BETBY come in these last six years? Did you ever think that you’d be in this kind of position so soon?

To be honest, no. If somebody, during the early stages of the company, would have told me that Magnus Carlsen would be coming to Riga to sign a brand ambassadorship with my company himself, I’d never have believed them. But now we are on a level where we can achieve such a feat and it’s only the beginning. While it is a multi-year, long-term partnership, we have a lot of things to introduce in the coming years.

Could you take us back to your thinking in late 2017 / early 2018 when you founded what was to become BETBY. What gap did you see in the market? Give us a sense of where your head was at when you founded the business.

Me and my partners had been in this industry for a while already and we used to partner with our current competitors on previous projects, so we knew a lot about the sportsbook products on offer. However, we realised that none of them could really satisfy our needs and thought that maybe it’s not only us who share this viewpoint. We wanted to create something more innovative, modern and beautiful because all the sportsbooks weren’t investing a lot in the UI.

The rather unrefined interfaces and UIX back then was hard to understand for casual players and that’s how we came to create BETBY. It was our mission in the beginning to fill this gap and create something that would be comfortable to use for the casual player. But then we realised that it is not only about the interface. There are also a lot of features missing there and we are still evolving and have identified a lot of things that still should be introduced into the sportsbook industry. We are on the way to doing that.

What were the early challenges for the business? Were there instances where you thought the business might not get off the ground or achieve the success you desired?

Honestly, if I knew then what I know about the challenges of creating a good sportsbook product, then perhaps I would not be in the business because it is a very complex and demanding project that only a select few companies can truly deliver. There are so many things that need to be controlled. I think the sportsbook is the most difficult product in the whole iGaming industry, technologically speaking, in terms of the risk management, trading – all its aspects. However, we decided to take these issues as a challenge, acknowledge there are a lot of problems, and embark on a journey to find solutions to them. I think we are well on the way to achieving this.

Are there particular investors, early customers or colleagues – former or existing – that have been instrumental in BETBY becoming the business it is today?

Yes, we have had a couple of clients from the very beginning, they are of course my ex-partners and friends from the industry. I deeply appreciate they believed in what we were building at that time. We were not so mature, and the product wasn’t as good as it is now, but they believed and invested with trust, not money. That trust gave us confidence and a determination to not let them down.

What impact did Covid and the pandemic have?

When the pandemic began, and live sports were cancelled we were of course concerned about what will happen to BETBY. We were only at the beginning of our journey and had only table tennis and Belorussian football in terms of live sports. Luckily, a little bit before the pandemic we launched our new product, BETBY Games, and this is what really saved the business. Now BETBY Games is one of the integral parts of the business and it generates up to 20 per cent of the overall GGR to our clients. It is a fantastic product, and it was a combination of luck and bravery to introduce something like this in those times. At the time we weren’t a well-known company, but a lot of people were willing to try something new in the pandemic. They tried out BETBY Games and they found that the product really performed.

What combination of factors is enabling BETBY to continue breaking its own financial records month on month?

I think the main thing is our culture within the company, how we work and never being satisfied with what we achieved. We set goals, attain them quickly, then grow faster. We are always hungry and have this passion to never stop. Genuinely it’s all about the people and our team, their level of competences and their loyalty. This is what helped us along the way all these years. We are very transparent in the way we go about doing things. For any employee and team member it is super clear what is going on in the company. We don’t have any secrets or hide anything.

We are open-minded, not just internally but towards our partners, our clients, and the industry. This is what we want to bring to the industry because I think it is too closed. Our approach is to say this is our product, this is our industry, and we’re proud of what we’re doing. There’s nothing to hide and I would really love to see the whole industry evolving and taking this stance.

Long-term, do you envisage BETBY becoming the go-to sportsbook within the industry for all the Tier One operators?

I believe we are on the way to becoming the go-to sportsbook provider. There are some operators who would never buy our solution nor use the BETBY sportsbook because they have their own, they have been in the industry for 20 years and, yes, in the meantime have developed good products. But even for these clients we want BETBY to become an integral part of their business.

That means that we will provide the whole sportsbook managed solution, but we will have a lot of pieces which can spice up the products even of our competitors or the clients who would never use a B2B sportsbook solution. That’s why we recently introduced AI Labs because these products can be used not only within the BETBY Sportsbook ecosystem but can also be used independently as a separate service. We don’t see anything like this in the industry right now, so we are on the forefront of AI solutions for sportsbook. Ultimately, we want to become an integral part of any betting company in the world.

Talking markets, one of your goals at this year’s outset was to expand into the regulated European markets and Latin America. How’s progress? What certifications and licences have been achieved, and which are ongoing?

Right now, we are focusing on Brazil and Ontario. This is where we are obtaining licences and certifications right now and we believe in these markets because they offer great potential. These are our main focuses currently, then we will go after more licences, mostly in Europe. In Latin America we are exploring Peru and Mexico, amongst others.

Asia is a very big market, and we are strong there, but it is much more complicated. In my opinion it is hard to say, “Asian market”. We should say every country is a specific market, so it is not united by one Asian sportsbook. You should be focused on every single country when it comes to that specific region. In Latin America it is more or less the same, but the general rules are more similar across different countries – how to provide the service, what kind of products they need, what kind of sports they like. In Asia, it doesn’t work like this.

One final word on Magnus. What was it that made you put pen to paper? It’s not inexpensive, it’s a lot of work. Why Magnus?

I’m a big fan of chess generally and of Magnus’ career, as are a lot of our team members in fact. We love chess within the company, so much so that we regularly have internal tournaments. Admittedly, I’m not a very good chess player – far from it. Magnus reflects BETBY’s values. He has a passion for excellence, for innovation, for strategic thinking, for overseeing the whole situation, and for finding the best move. These are the same values which shape BETBY as well.

Currently we might not be the biggest company in the industry in terms of turnover, but I think we are making the best and most precise moves to definitely become one of the biggest players in the industry. This is how Magnus plays his game.

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