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Joey Levy
Founder & CEO at Betr
Joey Levy is the Founder and CEO of Betr, a sports gaming and media company focused on micro-betting and fantasy sports.12 He co-founded Betr with Jake Paul in 2022.6 Levy has been building in the fantasy and sports betting space since 2014, starting while he was a student at Columbia University.15
Prior to Betr, Levy founded Simplebet, a B2B technology company that pioneered micro-betting on U.S. sports.3 He was also the founder of Draftpot (acquired in 2017) and a Thiel Fellow.3
Betr recently completed a $35M Series A2 funding round, valuing the company at $300 million.12 The company is currently operational in Ohio and Virginia, with plans to launch an online casino site by the end of 2024 and a new sportsbook product for the start of the NFL season.4
Levy's vision for Betr includes focusing on long-term, profitable growth rather than quick expansion.4 He aims to achieve $100 million in annual revenue by the end of the decade.4 Under his leadership, Betr has gained significant traction, reporting 1.3 billion impressions on social media in its first ten months.2
Highlights
Simplebet is being acquired by DraftKings for up to $195M. I am grateful to everyone who supported me and my co-founders Chris Bevilacqua and Scott Marshall along the way, which includes many amazing employees, investors, and other business associates. Simplebet pioneered microbetting as a new category of real money gaming — ultimately changing this industry and sports consumption forever.
Betr prepared itself for this outcome. We acquired the Chameleon platform in May 2023 and the Huddle Tech IP in August 2024, which eliminated our dependency on Simplebet, expanded our capabilities well beyond just microbetting, and enabled us to fully vertically integrate our product and technology. We also recouped a significant amount of Betr stock from Simplebet as well as eliminated certain cash commitments to Simplebet as part of an amicable separation ahead of their DraftKings transaction.
I am happy to close the Simplebet chapter on this note. Contrary to what many in this industry believe, I think we are still in the early innings of demonstrating what is possible from both a product and marketing standpoint in the sports gaming industry in the U.S., and I am excited to prove that with Betr.
Big day today for Betr. We are thrilled to launch Group Mode for Betr Picks and to soft launch the new Betr Sportsbook. Today's two product launches represent an important inflection point for Betr – Betr Picks will now be available to 65% of the U.S. population, enabling us to welcome millions of new sports fans to Betr for the first time, while the new Betr Sportsbook puts us on a path towards ramping investing in this vertical and positions us as having made the most progress towards competing in the Online Sports Betting industry amongst the other market leading fantasy sports pick em' operators. Significant product improvements are on the way across both Picks and Sportsbook but we are proud of the quick progress we have made here.
