WagerWire: The Startup Turning Sports Bets Into Tradeable Assets

The gaming industry is bustling with innovative entrepreneurs ready to gamble on great ideas. In the “Start Me Up” series, Casino Reports explores newer, smaller companies either making it big or showing the potential to do so.

So many successful products and inventions don’t reinvent the wheel; they simply make the wheel roll a heck of a lot smoother.

Keep that in mind as we take a stroll with a trio of UCLA fraternity brothers, the founders of WagerWire, a company that spotted a major inefficiency in the sports betting world and created a product to fill the space.

And it all happened because of a bet one of the principals made — and a bet another one of the guys wanted in on.

“Travis got home late from a movie set on a Thursday night and that Thursday Night Football game was already almost at halftime,” recounted Zach Doctor, one of the founders, discussing his roommate Travis Geiger, who was working in Hollywood. “He liked the bet that I had — on the Packers. And he wanted to buy into it. So he Venmo’d me $50, we figured out the right split, should it win. That was the initial lightbulb moment of, ‘Hey, you know, you should be able to buy and sell out of bets, you should be able to trade these things.’”

From that idea in 2018, the two of them — along with another friend, Guy Dotan — began the journey that would end up with the debut of WagerWire in 2021.

In its simplest terms, it’s a marketplace where people can buy and sell bets or portions of bets

“It’s just like stock trading 50 years ago,” Doctor, who brings a finance background to the venture, said. “You don’t have any ability to get in and out of these positions. The sportsbooks came up with that cash-out feature, but that’s just a total scam, charging 30-40-50 percent vig sometimes.”

And often, the cash-out feature isn’t even available. And for some bettors, hedging — another option — is financially impossible.

“A lot of our users are the guys who bet 50 bucks to win $100,000, $500,000, or more on a 12-leg parlay,” Doctor said. “They get down to the last couple of legs — they don’t have $200,000 of capital sitting around to hedge this thing out.”

Big money, big decisions

In October, this was highlighted by a bettor who wagered $20 to win over $967,000 on a 10-leg parlay. The first eight legs hit; the rest was resting on the Yankees winning the World Series and Inter Miami winning the MLS Eastern Conference. 

“He came to us after Googling how to get out of a bet,” Doctor said. “The sportsbook isn’t offering a cashout, and at the [then] current odds at Caesars, a bettor would’ve had to wager $287,000 to win the same payout.”

Doctor explained that $287K number would be the somewhat obvious ceiling the bettor could have expected to get on the WagerWire marketplace, though the final price would’ve been lower — but not too low.

“We generally find that happy medium where the buyer gets a discount and the seller gets more than the cash-out option would be,” Doctor said. 

The company’s first-ever big trade showcased its potential: An Arizona truck driver, recovering from an accident, had placed a $5 bet that could’ve won $680,000 on NFL season awards. Through WagerWire, he sold 20% of the ticket for $25,000 before the awards show — turning a profit regardless of the outcome. The bet ultimately lost by two votes on one leg.

“Bets no longer have to win for people to make money,” said Geiger, who serves as chief experience officer. “We think that’s a powerful concept.”

And Geiger takes it a step further — he sees WagerWire not only as a facilitator in the open market, but as a media company.

“These stories self-generate from our community,” Geiger said. “All we have to do is platform that person, give them their 15 minutes that they rightfully earned.”

Equal action to cash out

Of course, most bets on sale on the site aren’t million-dollar parlays. But Doctor says — based on intel he has gleaned from the sportsbooks themselves — that WagerWire does about as much business as the cash-out feature across the nation’s sportsbooks.

This is not small potatoes, as WagerWire takes a commission from each trade.

Looking ahead, WagerWire sees applications beyond sports betting, eyeing fantasy sports, survivor pools, and contest entries. The company has secured affiliate deals with major operators and are in “various stages of marketplace conversations” with sportsbooks, Doctor said, with the long term hope of WagerWire being integrated directly into the sportsbook apps themselves, giving bettors more options than they currently have.

“It’s the only asset that you buy but don’t own — a sports bet,” Geiger said. “If you’re overextended, you don’t have a way out as it stands now. It’s predatory what the books are doing with cash-out. Imagine if you bought a car, but you could only sell it back to the dealer, but only maybe, and only if they wanted to buy it from you, and only for the price they were willing to give you for it.”

Yep. WagerWire certainly does seem to fill a niche.