FIRST.bet's Tom Light: Sportsbooks Must Be Built by Bettors
FIRST.bet has spent two years building itself into a leading sportsbook supplier across Latin America and Brazil. Europe and Africa are next. And co-CEO Tom Light reckons the sportsbook itself is the only real point of differentiation operators have left.
Light started the company after his run at SBTech. He built it by studying the biggest B2C operators, DraftKings, Betano and bet365 among them, rather than copying other B2B suppliers. That thinking led him to hire Ian Bradley, the former DraftKings SVP and Light's old SBTech colleague, as co-CEO. "He is probably the best product guy in the world," Light said. What he wanted, he added, was someone who knows the product inside out. Not a conference handshake specialist.
The newest piece of that product is SportOS, which pulled steady traffic to the company's stand at SBC Summit 2026. It runs on artificial intelligence and lets users type a prompt to build a sportsbook and its user experience. Light's pitch is blunt. Everyone has the same slots and the same live dealer games. If the sportsbook is just another iFrame, there's nothing to sell. With SportOS, a marketing team can put its brand vision into the one place where it can actually stand out.
Bet builder is next. Light wants it to connect correlated and non-correlated selections as widely as possible, lifting market uptime and cutting the locks that frustrate bettors. "It's a dangerous game," he said. The risk is manageable, though. FIRST.bet's answer is Monte Carlo simulations: running a full match, passes, corners, free kicks and all 90 minutes, tens of thousands of times with a random number generator to price correlation exactly.
The product team, in Light's words, are all huge gamblers themselves. He compared it to a chef who loves steak. Staff bet on their own ideas, and that shows in what gets built. On compliance, FIRST.bet tends to apply its strictest measures across every market it enters. Light argued sports betting isn't addictive by design because the action happens on the TV, not the phone. He accepts reality checks and cool-off periods have their place, mind.
Rule variation is the harder problem. At Euro 2024, some markets allowed bets on games featuring the then-16-year-old Lamine Yamal. Others barred them. Some permitted match markets but not player props on him. Configurable technology is the only way to serve operators across those regimes.