Q&A: WagerWire’s CXO on the mainstream appeal of buying and selling bets

Founded in 2019, WagerWire exploited a gap in the market to create a secondary market where sportsbook customers can buy and sell their bets with each other. Ever since securing its first major round of seed funding in 2022, WagerWire has gone from strength to strength, and today includes daily fantasy sports (DFS) entry trading network FantasyWire as well as media platform Wire Media sitting under the umbrella of parent company Wire Industries.

WagerWire’s first seed round, to the tune of $3m, was funded partly by Miami Marlins and Leeds United co-owner Roger Ehrenberg, along with SimpleBet founder Joey Levy’s investment firm, 305 Ventures. The latest raise, in December 2024, involved former Pinnacle CEO Paris Smith, Pinnacle co-founder and businessman George Molsbarger, and notorious ‘Big Short’ trader Danny Moses.

Smith, at the time, described chief experience officer Travis Geiger and his fellow co-founders – Zach Doctor (CEO), and Guy Dotan (COO) – as “smart, passionate, willing to pivot, and create value in the market.” Later, in December 2023, WagerWire launched a marketplace for DFS players to trade pick’em plays on the Real Time Fantasy Sports platform via a partnership between the two companies. WagerWire would then incorporate the pick’em trading capability into its own app in July 2024.

The concept of buying and selling bet tickets has become a core component of the company’s strategy, and it’s a facet of the industry Geiger believes will see mainstream attention sooner rather than later.

EGR: What would you say was WagerWire’s standout achievement in 2024?

Travis Geiger (TG): The standout thing we did last year was totally break the model of marketing in sports betting because there had historically been a few playbooks that people would run. One was to try to outspend each other, another was to use a celebrity personality, and the other was paying influencers for posts. What we did is we turned every bet into a story, and every person into the star of that story.

For example, we had a bettor with a three-leg parlay whereby if Ohio State win , he wins half a million dollars. His name is ‘Calvin’ and he’s a normal dude from Tennessee who used to sell medical devices. Calvin is the perfect hero for the story and his bet is something that brings people along for that type of lottery-style, Deal or No Deal, or ‘what would I do with that kind of money?’ journey. It’s actionable because that bet is for sale.

This is the kind of story where we make a bunch of media around it, telling the story of the bet, the story of a Calvin and we take it around our media network that we’ve built. We reach out to the person and, if they choose public, we lay the foundation for the narrative that’s going to be amplified and then picked up.

Once that bet reaches maturity and the public’s eyes are on that game where a person could win a big amount of money, it starts to get picked up by bigger voices. Then it gets more traction and is picked up by social channels such as Bleacher Report or Action Network. Get enough buzz around that, then it’s ESPN or the New York Post.

Rather than buying ads or buying placement or buying influencers, we’re taking the everyman with the bet in a situation everyone would like to find themselves in and telling that story. That’s the advertisement.

Travis Geiger

EGR: How much difficulty do you have convincing people to go public?

TG: There’s a certain category of people who want to be anonymous. They’re generally buyers. In terms of the sellers, we had one person place 85 cents on a bet, and they could win $170,000. He sold his bet in the first round of the playoffs for $17,000. He’s happy with what he got, even if Ohio State goes on to win.

But there are people who are chasing their 15 minutes of fame almost as much as they’re chasing the payout. A study was released by UCLA which measured serotonin and dopamine releases.

The study compared when people saw more likes on their Instagram to when they saw more money in their bank account. They found there was an equal or greater dopamine release for social acceptance than there was for financial gain. A lot of people want their 15 minutes in the spotlight, and if they see someone else get it, they’re going to chase after it – that’s our hook.

EGR: Where will the capital from WagerWire’s latest funding round be directed?

TG: Right now, we’re building out our technology to have the infrastructure to be a marketplace that not only works in the US but abroad too. The idea of a bet resale market doesn’t exist in Asia or Australia – which is interesting because they can’t do live betting. However, if you have a pre-match bet that’s sellable, it scratches the same itch. We have a talented team of engineers that came from Smarkets, and a lot of our money is going into investing in what will become the StubHub of sports bets and making it compliant and able to plug into not only sportsbooks, but also daily fantasy sports contest entries or any tradable gaming asset.

We don’t spend a lot of money on marketing as it goes on the tech and sustaining ourselves through what I see as a war of attrition as these sportsbooks hollow out and it starts to become a duopoly. It’s both a challenge and an opportunity for us. They have to offer something different in their product than DraftKings and FanDuel or they go belly up. The autonomy you get after you’ve bought a bet and are able to sell all of it or part of it is not only a differentiator, it’s going to drive more handle for the books, too.

I think this is going to change the entire paradigm of betting as it changes it from a win/lose proposition all the time to this dynamic asset. People are going to start thinking about their bets as an investment with a maturity date. That’s going to change behavior for the better for the books. Cash-out is an interesting tool, but people have a bad attitude around it because there’s a distrust of the books. This is the evolution of cash-out that allows the books to keep their margins but offer an alternative, and one that’s always available.

EGR: Does having high-profile investors such as ex-Pinnacle CEO Paris Smith and Betr and Simplebet founder Joey Levy make future funding rounds easier?

TG: We’ve been very fortunate to have the smartest people on both ends of the spectrum. People who created what we know as the industry in the form of someone like Paris Smith, and then the people who are leading the charge on the paradigm shift in the form of people like Joey Levy.

Fundraising is always hard, especially in this environment. Look at the track record of our lead investor Roger Ehrenberg , where he took four or five different companies to IPO after starting at the angel investment stage.

The fundraising environment, I cannot stress this enough, is tough even for the best idea. We have our peers, which are products that I love, which are struggling just to get anything out of the investment class. We’ve had the most success with high-net-worth individuals who have firm convictions and a vision. The same vision of inevitability that Roger has.

EGR: Will WagerWire target another funding round in 2025?

TG: Crazily enough, our media and affiliate are monetizing at a rate that we hope we won’t have to raise more unless its growth capital. Our goal is with our current infrastructure to get to cashflow positive as quickly as possible, which could even be this year. We can cashflow our business just off of media and affiliate, so even before we have products in market, we are structurally profitable. Which is similar to what Betr Media did. Joey is using Betr Media to fund the tech and that side of the house. Likewise, we’re using our affiliate media to support our collective efforts.

EGR: In May 2024, the Nevada Gaming Control Board rejected the introduction of betting ticket exchange PropSwap in the state. Given that you offer a similar product, did this impact WagerWire’s plans to roll out its platform in other states?

TG: We were never looking at Nevada as a hard launch purely because their rules are so unique. It was basically determined that bets on the secondary market were, in their mind, the same as normal bets. What differentiates us from them, and what actually makes that ruling not necessarily apply to us, is that we partner directly with the sportsbooks.

We’re a vendor. They have the license and they underwrite the risk – we’re basically just a listing platform. What PropSwap does is different; they take ownership of the bet and do it as a side deal. In that way it’s much different to what we’re doing as a feature the sportsbook is offering, versus what is basically ticket scalping. They don’t want ticket scalpers in Nevada and who can blame them?

EGR: How have you dealt with navigating the different regulatory requirements between states?

TG: A lot of regulators are starting to view us as consumer protection. If you were to place a bet and you put too much down, right now you’re stuck with it. We provide an out – we’re actually a way to give agency back to the bettors. We think WagerWire is going to be part of the new responsible gaming framework. The metaphor we like to use is imagining if you bought a car from the dealership and then you were stuck with it. You couldn’t sell it, and you were stuck with it whether it was a lemon or not. You could only sell it back to the dealership if they wanted to buy it, and only for the price they were willing to offer. That would be predatory.

We’re big on responsible gambling and mental health. We’re partnering with gambling treatment specialist Birches Health doing mental health initiatives. My sister is actually an addiction specialist there, and she’s concerned that I’m part of the problem! She wants to be part of the solution so we’re working together.

Another thing about regulation is we’re an approved vendor in all the states we operate in. We rely on and partner with casinos in these states, and we walk right up to the regulator and tell them what we’re doing. We walk right up to the sportsbooks and partner with them, so it’s all incredibly compliant. We had more lawyers than employees up until 18 months ago.

EGR: What can we expect to see from WagerWire in the next 12 months?

TG: If we do our jobs right, you’ll be seeing everyone in America, and hopefully the world, talking about these bets for sale. We want to flip people’s mentality, let them know this is coming, and show there’s incredible demand for this. I think the dominoes are going to start to tip, so this year is a domino-tipping year for us.

We also want to show that our media approach is very effective. We can save the sportsbooks money. It’s more genuine than feeling like you’re being advertised at. It’s a community-based approach and we want to grow our community. I don’t know if I want to fully get into the AI aspect of it all, but we have some very interesting models that are brand new which we have a lot of conviction for and in very creative ways. You’ll be seeing us prove those out on the big stage.