‘Betting on Innovation: The Evolution and Future of nVenue’ - with Kelly Pracht

In this episode of Talent First, I talk to Kelly Pracht, Co-Founder of nVenue a predictive analytics and micro-betting technology platform built for sports betting businesses and sports media. Although this is a departure from EdTech, the focus of Season Three, I was fascinated with Kelly's career, the fact that she is a woman not only in tech but in sports and sports betting, and of course the technology itself. Kelly and I had a great chat, discussing topics like AI and ML and the myths that surround it, and nVenue's approach to responsible gambling. Bio: The native Texan is a pioneer in machine learning, data, and analytics. For over 18 years, she was responsible for leading and directing teams of innovators, researchers, engineers, and go-to-market teams to drive new products to market for Hewlett Packard (across Workstations, Integrity servers, ProLiant, Moonshot, Edgeline, Apollo, and the HPC family of supercomputers) before compiling her love of sports with her passion for entrepreneurship, leading to the trailblazing launch of nVenue. Kelly holds multiple patents for her work in super-computing and engineering. In 2017, inspired by her work in building supercomputers for high tech - she wrote the first lines of code for a sports machine learning platform - which ultimately became a lightning-fast ML/AI kernel for nVenue's real-time analytics engines. The growth of the gaming and gambling industry during that time gave Pracht a window to fully expand her vision, which led to the full launch of the company in 2019. nVenue is now known as a powerful in-game betting solutions company that powers thousands of real-time probabilities and micro-betting odds for every play across NBA, NASCAR, MLB, and the NFL. Kelly was recently nominated as one of Sports Business Journal’s Tech Executive of the Year. She also received a Cynopsis Award for Digital Executive of the Year. Kelly earned her BSEE from the Colorado School of Mines and her MSEE at Colorado State University. She resides in Houston, Texas, with her husband and family of fellow Houston Astros fans.