Huddle to establish quant hub in London as startup begins hiring spree
Betting supplier will likely add an East-Coast base for US operations once its European hubs are firmly established
Sports betting startup Huddle is looking to hire 20 new staffers by Q3 2021 to work from a small quant hub in London and an engineering centre in Zagreb, Croatia, EGR has learned.
The team of former Simplebet executives are in the process of establishing these two offices and moving three of their four founders back to Europe to build the business.
Huddle CEO and co-founder Francesco Borgosano will relocate from New York back to London, where he previously worked for both Ladbrokes and The Stars Group, to set-up and run the small quant office.
Francesco Borgosano – Huddle CEO and co-founder
“We’re going to build our quant and product team in London and our engineering hub in Zagreb, the main reason being that the UK is the most mature market when it comes to the betting industry, especially when it comes to quant and product, and in my experience that domain knowledge is very important,” Borgosano told EGR.
Borgosano said Zagreb is a growing tech hub, with the likes of Superbet having acquired Zagreb-based technology development studio Axilis in August 2019, and its top investor, private equity firm Emma Capital, is also based in Zagreb.
Emma Capital helped form European lottery giant Sazka Group and now owns the biggest stake in Croatian sports betting operator SuperSport after Sazka’s assets were divided between two investors.
Borgosano told EGR the supplier will eventually establish a small US base on the East Coast once the startup is firmly established in Europe.
“We see North America and Latin America as the biggest opportunity [for us] from a commercial perspective, but at this stage our focus is product development and so it didn’t make sense to start building the business in the States,” he said.
“Operationally, we also need to be as cost effective as possible and in US cities the cost of living can be very high, and human resources very expensive.
“As we grow and roll out our products, we definitely see the US having an operational branch and we are planning to set up our business development and commercial operations on the East Coast,” Borgosano added.
Borgosano said the team has an ambitious development plan and will build its full end-to-end betting solution via microservices architecture so each service can be sold separately.
“We will be providing odds for American sports, and football and tennis to B2C or B2B operators and that’s why we are looking for quants, because our goal is to build all the technology and algorithms in-house,” he said.
“Following on from that, we will expand into also building the trading and risk functionality and our goal is to launch this product in the next 16 months.
“That should be enough time for us to prove our concept and prove that we are capable of delivering, and by that time we should have a team in place and then we can go out and raise another round of capital,” Borgosano said.
Huddle secured $3m in its first capital raising efforts late last year.
Three of its four co-founders were working with US-based supplier Simplebet up until April 2020.