【borgata 2025 winter open】NYC 2025: Why Jai Maw sold Betting Hero and bought it back

Speaking on the “Built to Sell” panel alongside Tom Waterhouse, Matt Restivo and Karolina Pelc, Maw took the audience on a journey, explaining why he and co-founder Jeremy Jakary decided to buy back the business they had sold to FansUnite in 2021.

He also offered advice to founders considering an exit.

“If there are founders or executives out there in companies looking to exit at some point, take notes, because I certainly made a lot of the mistakes these guys have spoken about.”

A side hustle

Maw and Jakary launched Betting Hero — originally named Sports Betting Street Team (SBST) — in 2018 as an offline affiliate business while working full-time jobs.

Maw worked at research firm Gartner, while Jakary was an early employee at Glassdoor.

“Friday afternoon, we’d fly out to Philadelphia, drive to Atlantic City, activate on behalf of our clients. Sunday evening, we’d take the red-eye home, do all client reporting, land at 1:00AM, and go back to work the next day,” Maw recalled.

At the time, investors doubted the business model.

“They told us: ‘There is no way that an in-person activation company is going to be successful in this industry. We, as operators, don’t need you. We can convert our own customers. They’re going to sign up on their own. It’s so easy. It’s so simple,’” Maw explained.

“Now, seven years later, we’ve activated over 600,000 people in every single legal state and built an in-house research division, largely in demand from operators because they said: ‘Hey, you know our customers better than us.'”

The first sale

In 2021, Betting Hero was acquired by FansUnite Entertainment, which was a small-cap, publicly traded Canadian company at the time.

When asked why they sold, Maw explained: “We’d never done this before. We weren’t experienced founders, and we were still relatively new to the sports betting space.”

“We thought we needed to sell the company, that we needed to go on as founders and that it sounded great.”

At the time, they were in discussions with multiple potential buyers before choosing FansUnite.

‘Disaster mitigation’

However, the reality of life within a small public company soon set in.

“I can’t go into massive detail about what happened at FansUnite because they’re a publicly traded company, and candidly, that’s a part of my life that I hope not to relive in too many ways, but learn from. We knew pretty early on that this was not the right home for us.”

He added that Betting Hero quickly became the only profitable part of the company.

“We were the asset that was keeping that business afloat in many ways,” Maw explained.

“When you’re in that environment, it’s difficult to invest in strategic growth, innovation, expansion, and product development — areas that were critical to our long-term objectives and the objectives we set out together with FansUnite.

“You know, no fault of FansUnite, we just weren’t able to execute on those things. So very quickly, we turned our attention to, honestly, a little bit of disaster mitigation.”

Maw and Jakary had an earnout and could have walked away — but they weren’t ready to abandon their creation.

“When you build something, it’s your baby,” he said. “We knew the right thing to do was to get Betting Hero out of FansUnite. Not because FansUnite was a bad place, but because we weren’t able to execute on the things we needed to.”

The buyback

Reacquiring Betting Hero wasn’t easy.

“It was an incredibly complicated deal,” Maw admitted. “We were the buyer, the seller, and the largest shareholders in FansUnite.”

Fortunately, GeoComply stepped in as a strategic partner, acquiring a 40% stake while Maw and Jakary regained majority control.

The deal closed in August 2024, allowing the co-founders to refocus on growth and innovation.

“We’re now doing what we thought we were going to do two years ago — focus on innovation, growth, and expansion,” Maw said.

When asked whether he would sell Betting Hero a second time, however, Maw didn’t hesitate.

“Of course.”