Tom Light, FIRST.bet: “Sportsbook is a winner-takes-all market”

Shows & conferences - 16 October, 2026

During SBC Summit Lisbon 2026, Focus Gaming News sat down with Tom Light, Founder & CEO at FIRST.bet, to discuss why sportsbook is becoming the key differentiator for operators, the company’s leadership change and its use of AI.

Light said sportsbook was “the neglected thing” for a long time, with casino taking most of the attention and the big B2B providers focusing on the US with products that were not up to standard. Most operators using B2B sportsbooks, he said, run roughly 90 per cent casino and 10 per cent sports, a ratio he does not consider right. FIRST.bet aims to give local operators a product they can use to compete with international giants such as Bet365 and Betano, and picks markets where a large B2C operator is putting pressure on the locals. Rather than a “vanilla turnkey solution”, he said, the company offers an engine that lets operators express their own brand and look and feel.

On the appointment of Ian Bradley as co-CEO, Light explained that the company did not want another big B2B executive: its focus is product and sportsbook technology. Bradley, formerly SVP Sportsbook at DraftKings, was seen as the right person to lead product and technology, for his skills as well as his name. “If you build it, they will come,” Light said of B2B deals.

Light also described how FIRST.bet is using AI. Its front-end APIs let operators build their own front end, but that normally requires a full development team. The company has therefore created an MCP for Claude and Codex, teaching the AI how to build a sportsbook, so that “a few sentences” of prompt can produce a working sportsbook using FIRST.bet’s APIs without development.

 

Light called sportsbook “a winner-takes-all market”. Operators offer the same slots, live dealer, payments and crash games, he argued, so “the only place for an operator to differentiate is the sportsbook”. In Brazil, he said, FIRST.bet became the largest B2B sports betting provider after entering to stop players leaving for rivals at weekends. Brazil, he added, was shut at the time of the interview, and whether it returns is “50/50”. Meanwhile, FIRST.bet was preparing to receive a UK licence, already held Swedish and Malta licences, and planned to enter regulated jurisdictions in Africa and more of LatAm.