‘Tinder for betting’ app Bookee swipes major startup award

Sports betting app Bookee looks to be on to a winner after scooping the top prize in the prestigious Brightest Minds Showcase at the iGaming Entrepreneur Conference.

The innovative mobile-only platform – which has been described as “Tinder for betting” – was chosen ahead of 12 fellow startups at the London event as it landed a mentoring and professional services package worth more than £25,000.

Bookee was founded by former school friends Adam Kalmanson, previously with William Hill, and Adam Wilson, once of 888, with the aim of creating a personalised and social platform for the recreational gambler.

Already available via Apple’s App Store, the Bookee app collates individual sports bets for the user and provides them with a single instinctive binary action for each bet. And just as with the Tinder dating app, users swipe right to approve or left to reject.

Kalmanson said: “We are delighted to have won the Bright Minds Showcase at this year’s iGaming Entrepreneurs Conference. We’d like to wish all our fellow start-ups the best of luck in 2017, and look forward to sharing more awesome features in Bookee in the coming months.

“Bookee is about simplicity. We invented this app because we became frustrated with how stuck in the past parts of the betting industry are. Where other betting sites have adapted a 100-year-old infrastructure to retro-fit the smartphone revolution, the Bookee app is specifically designed for mobile use only.”

Each entrant presented a 60-second pitch video before answering questions from the assembled experts, mentors and investors at the Grange Hotel, Tower Bridge.

Bookee’s prize includes mentoring from industry experts such as Sportingbet founder Mark Blandford, Income Access head Nicky Senyard, and Melissa Blau, founder of iGaming Capital.

“The mentoring and service providers all voted on their top three-rated projects based on innovation, team, likelihood of success and several other factors,” said Michael Caselli, the organiser of iGaming Entrepreneurs Conference, which took place on December 6.

“We then scored all the projects to find a winner that each mentor and provider agreed they would like to support and work with.”

Related article: The Brightest Minds Showcase: The Biggest Pitch Prize in iGaming