Boxer, YouTube star, and rare Pokémon card collector Jake Paul has raised funding upwards of $50 million for a Miami-based sports betting company.
Paul teamed up with sports betting veteran Joey Levy on the startup Betr, which is being touted as the first micro-betting direct to consumer company. Investors so far include DeSean Jackson, Travis Scott, Richard Sherman and Ezekiel Elliott, according to a report by Variety.
The company will be anchored by a media venture called BS w/ Jake Paul targeted toward “the next generation of sports fans.” Paul will have celebrity guests on the show, where he’ll discuss sports and sports betting.
Paul released a statement about the endeavor and called himself the president of the company.
“I wasn’t into sports betting until I was introduced to micro-betting… “Micro-betting is the TikTok-ification of sports betting and I am excited to bring it to the masses through Betr. We are in this for the long haul and are focused on doing things the right way. We are getting licensed state-by-state, adhering to each state’s regulatory framework while advocating for important consumer protections and responsible gambling. We want to be the category defining consumer company in both sports betting and sports media by the end of the decade and are confident we will achieve that goal.”
Instead of betting on the games, Betr focuses on betting for singular events, like pitches during baseball games, and plays and drives during football. Paul’s partner Levy already has his foot in the industry with Simplebet, a company that he said pioneered micro betting.
“‘I co-founded Simplebet to simplify the sports betting user experience – to reconsider why sports betting products felt uninterpretable to the casual fan who had never bet on sports before,’ Levy said. ‘In doing so, we discovered that the technology required to enable a scalable micro-betting platform around the moments that drive U.S. sports did not yet exist, given the global market’s focus was on soccer, a fluid sport without a natural start and stop cadence. So we decided to build it ourselves at Simplebet; however, years later, the user experience remains unintuitive for a mass market consumer.’”
Betr will use Simplebet’s tech and release in “the coming weeks.” It’ll start out in a free-to-play format for all 50 states and slowly roll out a real money experience over the course of the year state-by-state. Betr claims it has made deals with multiple states using “strategic equity-based partnerships that the company will be announcing in the near future.”
Despite Paul’s somewhat-controversial standing in the sports and entertainment world, the company has secured a large number of investors. Paul rose to fame on the now-shuttered app Vine and was on two seasons of the Disney Channel show Bizaardvark.
He’s been the subject of numerous headlines and allegations over the years, including paying $3.5 million for fake Pokémon cards, being charged with criminal trespass, and threatening to box Mike Tyson.
