Interesting. This Couple Built an Obscure Corner of Sports Betting Into a Billion-Dollar Business Even before online wagering on sports was legal in the U.S., Anna Sainsbury and David Briggs predicted that gambling apps would need to know where their customers were. These days, almost no mobile betting happens without them. Anna Sainsbury and David Briggs, the husband-and-wife team that founded GeoComply. Alana Paterson For The Wall Street Journal By Katherine Sayre April 21, 2023 10:00 am ET 9 RESPONSES VANCOUVER—A husband-and-wife team founded a tech company here that is quietly policing nearly every bet made in the multibillion-dollar online-gambling industry in the U.S. GeoComply scrutinizes nearly every online bet on sports to determine whether the wager is happening in a state where it’s legal. Over the past five years, the company has signed on DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars and other betting operators as customers as online gambling rapidly expanded across the U.S. The company blocks betsfrom gamblers in the wrong states and bettors spoofing their locations to skirt the law, and monitors dark-web fraudsters pursuing the big promotional sign-on bonuses offered by betting companies. Geolocation is a necessary check—using Wi-Fi signals, GPS, cell tower signals and other data—before a wager can be accepted. Anna Sainsbury and her husband David Briggs founded the company about a dozen years ago while working in the gambling industry, after they predicted the need for geolocation and placed their own bet with their money and careers. These days, almost no online gambling in the U.S. can happen without them. “Number one goal is no downtime,” said Ms. Sainsbury, chief executive of GeoComply. Lately, at least one competitor is moving in. GeoComply’s patent has been challenged. And the rapid expansion of sports betting across the U.S. appears to be slowing down. For now, though, the company is crucial for betting firms trying to navigate an industry where each of the 50 U.S. states can have different rules and federal law makes sports betting across state lines illegal. That 1960s-era federal ban was originally intended to combat mobsters’ profitable schemes taking sports and horse-racing bets over the phone.