All bets are on for Cork sports gambling start-up LiveDuel

LiveDuel, a Cork-based sports betting start-up, expects to go live with its product later this year after it closes a funding round of $2.5 million (€2.3 million). The firm, which was founded by Will Martin, Alex Djordjevic and Laura Bosazzi in 2021, currently has six staff and has raised €250,000 in funding to date.

The business has developed a sports betting platform aimed at the younger generation coming onto the market. It operates under the hood like an exchange, with all action and winnings solely determined by the user betting movement, playing against each other rather than a sportsbook itself.

The part that faces the consumer, however, appears more like a traditional sportsbook, to simplify the interface for punters.

“We’re targeting digital natives. A lot has changed since sports betting moved online 25 years ago, so we’ve built LiveDuel with modern consumers in mind. We have a clean user experience and interface but it operates like an exchange, so you are not playing against the house. You’re playing against the market,” Martin told the Business Post.

“Betfair and others like them were very innovative 25 years ago, but nothing has really changed with those products since then. We’re simplifying the user experience. Traditional exchanges were built by traders for traders, but miss the mark with the average sports fan.”

LiveDuel is deliberately offering fewer choices than most exchanges. This is due to users getting “glassy eyed”, as Martin put it, by an average of 18 options per football match on a betting exchange compared to three on a sportsbook. The goal of his business is to provide all the fairness of odds delivered through exchanges in a way that is more user-friendly.

Community

“We’re focused on building a community around content. If you think about a traditional sportsbook, as the house it is rooting for its users to lose. By removing ourselves as the house, we can be more focused on content to build a community,” he said.

Martin has been thinking about LiveDuel since back in college in UCC in the late 2000s. He got interested in sports betting and arbitrage while studying economics. With many operators selling essentially the same product – the chance to bet – he felt there was room to innovate. After further work as a stock trader, he eventually made the move with his co-founders to start LiveDuel three years ago.

The product should be live later this year, taking real money bets for the first time. The heavy focus will be on football betting at the start, to enable it to work more directly with content creators focused on that sport.

“It’s been a long time building it. As a sports betting product, we need to be regulated. Finalising that has taken a long time, including factoring in the implications of different jurisdictions,” Martin said.

“We will be targeting markets in Latin America, Africa and southeast Asia at the start. With the cost of licences in the US, and it being regulated on a state by state basis, it will take a little longer to launch there.”