Kero Gaming founder and CEO Tomash Devenishek has challenged the prevailing notion within the sports betting industry that betting is an entertainment product.

However, he believes that Kero Gaming’s AI-powered micro-betting platform could revolutionise the industry through personalised in-game micro-betting experiences, and a patent pending single model pricing system which leverages generative AI for oddsmaking simulations.

Too complicated

“In the industry, a lot of people talk about sports betting as entertainment, but it’s really not,” Devenishek said at a recent Yolo Partners event in Tallinn, Estonia.

“Sports betting today is highly cognitive and testing. You have to think, you have to browse, calculate probabilities, and eventually find that one thing that you want to bet on.

“Twitter and Instagram are not like that. Because all you have to do is just scroll your thumb and things appear,” he said.

Devenishek went on: “So, for betting to become an entertainment product we have to integrate the principles commonly found in mainstream digital entertainment products.”

By emulating the social and instant gratification elements characteristic of popular social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, he said, Kero Sports aims to transform sports betting into a more seamless and enjoyable experience.

Attracting investment

Founded in 2019, Kero Sports has garnered attention as one of the hottest start-ups in the iGaming industry.

The company has attracted investment from both Robin Reed’s HappyHour.io and Tim Heath’s Yolo Investments.

Using real-time play-by-play data and advanced AI algorithms, Kero recommends to users engaging betting markets to place bets effortlessly every 15 to 30 seconds, eliminating the need for extensive browsing and calculations that are typical of traditional sports betting.

Making it personal

Looking ahead, Kero Sports is not resting on its laurels. The company is currently working on incorporating personalisation into its platform.

By analysing users’ behavioural data, including their betting preferences and interests, Kero Sports intends to offer a tailored betting experience.

This will ensure that users are presented with a curated selection of markets that maximise their engagement.

“There are so many good markets that we are able to produce but we don’t want our customers to scroll. We don’t want to offer 600 different markets. We want it to be one that maximises the likelihood that one is betting,” he said.

The personalisation feature will be delivered through two methods: a full product that can be embedded as a web iframe or an SDK for casino-only clients, and an API that allows partners to inject real-time micro-markets into their existing platforms.

Single model pricing

Kero has also made an exciting announcement in the realm of generative AI.

The company recently filed a patent for a unique approach, which involves training generative AI models to generate coherent sequences of play-by-play events in sports games.

The company needed a solution to provide odds on highly complex micro markets, which do not lend themselves well to traditional oddsmaking methods.

A breakthrough was achieved by leveraging AI to simulate thousands of concurrent variations of matches, from which pricing for various betting opportunities can be computed.

“One of the key challenges that we as a company face is that most of our markets are unique.

“For a long time, this has been a constraint for us,” Devenishek said.

However, the rise of ChatGPT got him thinking: “Sports and sports games are kind of like a language, with a serious of events happening, such as corners, passes, crosses, counter attacks and goals,” he explained.  

Kero built a model – internally called BetGPT – that when prompted generates thousands of coherent  variations of a specific match. 

“Based on these results, we can easily price any micro/macro event within a match. The output was quite consistent with the dedicated multi-model approach we and the industry use.”

In conversation with iGaming NEXT, Devenishek said he believes in the future this will become the predominant “pricing method” for the industry.