GMonitor, a competitive intelligence platform for iGaming operators, won First Pitch at SBC Summit in Lisbon last week, beating four other finalists for a prize package valued at more than €100,000. CEO Rishin Kesarla and COO Hakon Magnusson pitched together, with Magnusson playing a character based on the company's customers. The competition is co-organized with BettingStartups.
The win capped a busy stretch. Days earlier, the pair had been in Las Vegas for the ninth cohort of the Zero Labs accelerator, an experience Kesarla said narrowed the company's focus.
GMonitor automatically collects what every operator in a market is doing across promotions, games, advertising, and social media, cross-references those signals against its historical data, and tells a team what's working and what to do about it. The alternative, as the founders describe it, is a country manager with a VPN scrolling competitor sites and matching offers on instinct. "You can kinda cancel your existing stack, Frankenstack as we call it, of generic market intelligence subscriptions that aren't specific for iGaming," Kesarla said on the BettingStartups Podcast. Customers pay a monthly subscription for the web app, with custom reports quoted separately.
The platform is primarily live in Spain, with coverage in Canada and Greece. Its customers run from regional casinos moving from land-based to online up to large operators with their own business intelligence teams. "No matter how big a team is, you can't keep tabs on 60 licensed operators in a given market," Magnusson said. One large Latin American operator, he added, called the product a "golden weapon" after a first call.
Kesarla calls competitive intelligence the company's wedge product, one that works without any client data. The next step is plugging into operators' internal systems, which would let GMonitor automate workflows and write back to a CRM—and that's a harder sell. "No one wants to give up their internal data, their secret sauce," he said. The plan is to earn that trust with the external product first. Further out, the roadmap includes regulatory intelligence and products for suppliers, affiliates, and sportsbooks.
The founders met while studying abroad in college. Kesarla graduated last year with a math and computer science degree and has already built and exited an AI startup in another sector. Magnusson helped run one of the larger B2B gaming news sites in Spain.
GMonitor has been bootstrapped to this point. It has now opened a pre-seed round to take the platform live in every regulated market, and within a year it wants its first full contracts running on operators' internal data.
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