Big Data betting business gets investment from industry leaders

A GAMING company which uses big data and sophisticated algorithms to improve the quality of its horse race predictions has already won big by attracting “significant” investment to back its growth.

Equotion uses 50 million data points and the seven years of racing history to predict the likely outcome of any race, anywhere in the world.

The technology start-up is now ready to step up after more than two years of testing and refining its system, and has brought on board investment and a non-executive chairman to back its ambitions.

New chairman Graham Martin was the founder of Bonne Terre, the current licence holder for SkyBet, and he now advises and invests in gaming companies across the world. Further investment has come from Gordon Black of Black Family Investments, who recently successfully exited from Yorkshire success story High Street TV.

Mr Martin said: “Equotion is the most exciting current development in the world of sports analytics today. The accuracy that the team have been able to demonstrate is astonishing and the toolset has the capability to turn the world of gambling on its head, putting the punter in the driving seat.”

Although the company declined to put a value on the investment, they described it as “significant”.

The business is forecasting to attract up to 5,000 subscribers over the next year while it will also roll out syndicated services, including data feeds to other betting websites.

The funding will be used to create a new betting app that can automatically place bets, to fund international development, and to develop the system for other sports including football, tennis and golf.

“It is starting to get quite interesting and exciting,” said James Waterhouse, the Ilkley-based founder of Equotion. “The overall accuracy is running between 25% and 33%, that’s by far the best in the industry.”

“It has taken two and a half years to get it to where it is today. We have been testing it now for just over two years to check it is generally consistent. The underlying scoring mechanic is very, very robust.”

Equotion’s predictive technology enables gamblers to improve their return by relying on science to increase their accuracy over a sustained period of betting – although the company itself focuses on accuracy rather than return because “the return is variable, but the accuracy is not”.

“This isn’t about saying who is going to win the 3.05 from Cheltenham,” said Mr Waterhouse. “We are saying ‘here’s 35 horses, and we will get three out of 10 or four out of 10’.

“I still think we have a fair way to go in terms of accuracy but we are already a number of times better than the pundits in the market.”

He plans to use this advantage to grow the business over the next two years.

He added: “We are a new business – the first milestone is getting the business cash-positive, which we plan to do in the next 12 months. The next milestone is becoming profitable, then we think we can grow the turnover up to £3-5m over the next two years.”