Founders

Founder & CEO, IndexFair

Konstantin has spent nearly two decades inside the sports-betting industry in roles that span the most mechanically complex and the most commercially demanding sides of the business.

From 2008 to 2012 he led the Russian-language launch of Betfair, the betting exchange whose order-book mechanics are arguably the most transparent product the industry has ever produced — odds emerge from other bettors, not from a house margin. The operational and analytical discipline that environment demanded shaped how Konstantin reads operator behaviour to this day: when you have worked with a product where every price is observable and every counterparty is named, the opacity of standard sportsbook operations becomes much harder to unsee.

He then held senior growth and market-strategy roles at bet-at-home, Rivalo, and Catena Media, advising on Eastern European market expansion across multiple gambling verticals. Each of those companies operates at a different point on the operator-publisher spectrum: bet-at-home is a licensed multi-market operator, Rivalo a regulated sportsbook focused on emerging markets, and Catena Media one of the largest publicly listed gambling-affiliate publishers in the world. Working across all three gave Konstantin direct exposure to how operators package their narratives to affiliates, how affiliates package those narratives to consumers, and the systematic gaps between those two layers that no participant has an incentive to close.

In 2012 he founded Vseprosport.ru, a Russian-language sports analytics publication that now reaches roughly two million monthly visitors. The editorial approach — data-driven match previews, operator reviews graded on observable criteria rather than press releases — became the template for the methodology IndexFair runs on today.

Across the same period Konstantin has been a consistent public voice on responsible gambling, contributing long-form analysis to RG.org and other industry publications on player-protection topics ranging from fast-bet addiction risk to bankroll management to bank-level gambling blocks. His stated vision, published in his RG.org contributor profile, is “to cultivate a transparent, data-driven betting ecosystem where informed players, ethical operators, and rigorous regulation coexist — turning every wager into a responsible, insight-powered experience.” That posture is not a marketing position; it is the working hypothesis IndexFair's methodology is built on. The platform exists precisely because the gap between operators' marketing claims and operators' actual treatment of players is the largest unaddressed consumer-protection problem in regulated gambling, and rating that gap honestly is the prerequisite for any meaningful responsible-gambling outcome.

In 2019 he co-founded UFFILIATES.me, an international CPA affiliate network for licensed gambling and betting operators. The relationship between UFFILIATES and IndexFair, and the structural firewall that separates them, is documented in the governance section below.

Konstantin sits on the international jury of the BR Awards, a sports-betting industry recognition programme covering operators in markets outside IndexFair's current scope. Membership is a professional affiliation, not a commercial relationship with any operator IndexFair rates. He also speaks regularly at SBC Summit, Betting Trends Forum, and Sigma.world, and graduated from Orenburg State University with a marketing degree in 2005. He is based in Malta and Canada.

Why he founded IndexFair. Eighteen years across the industry's operator, affiliate, and publishing sides made it obvious that no genuinely independent, methodology-first rating platform existed for consumer gambling brands. Affiliate sites rank by commission. Trade press ranks by relationship. Regulators publish licenses, not quality signals. IndexFair fills the gap — methodology committed to code, scoring auditable in public, no advertiser influence on the rating itself. The Bloomberg Terminal model, applied to gambling-brand trust.

Co-founder & CTO, IndexFair

Dmitry is the technical architect behind the platforms that gave Konstantin and the wider editorial team their analytical reach. As CTO of Vseprosport.ru and CTO of UFFILIATES.me, he has built the data pipelines, tracking infrastructure, and operational systems that process millions of events per month across multiple consumer-facing products.

His work over the past several years has focused on applying machine learning and large-language-model systems to the operational problems of media and affiliate platforms — content quality classification, fraud detection in CPA traffic, automated content generation at scale with editorial oversight, and the kind of structured-data pipelines that turn unstructured review text into the aspect-level signals IndexFair uses to score brands.

Why he co-founded IndexFair. The technical substrate for an honest rating platform — methodology-as-code, version-controlled scoring, reproducible aggregation across hundreds of disparate review sources, transparent computation that any reader can audit — did not exist as an integrated product anywhere in the gambling industry. Building it from scratch, on modern infrastructure, with the methodology committed to git alongside the code that runs it, was a problem worth founding a company over.

The founders of IndexFair have substantial prior and ongoing involvement in the gambling industry. We do not hide this. We publish it here, because the alternative — concealing it and letting readers discover it through search — would be both dishonest and a direct breach of the DMCC Act 2024's publisher-accountability requirements.

Konstantin Ulanov is the active co-founder of UFFILIATES.me, an international CPA affiliate network for gambling and betting operators. UFFILIATES has commercial relationships with approximately 300 to 500 operator partners across 50+ jurisdictions, including several brands that appear on the UK-licensed gambling catalogue IndexFair rates.

Konstantin is also the founder of Vseprosport.ru, a Russian-language sports analytics publication that monetises in part through affiliate links to licensed operators. Vseprosport's geographic focus (CIS) is distinct from IndexFair's (United Kingdom, with planned expansion to other regulated jurisdictions per our roadmap).

Konstantin sits on the international jury of the BR Awards, a sports-betting industry recognition programme covering operators in markets outside IndexFair's current scope. Membership is a professional affiliation, not a commercial relationship with any operator IndexFair rates.

Dmitry Sergeev holds CTO roles at both Vseprosport.ru and UFFILIATES.me. His technical contributions to IndexFair are firewalled from the editorial methodology by the same rules that govern Konstantin's role: code review on scoring logic is methodology-driven, version-controlled, and publicly auditable through our /changelog page.

A disclosure that says “trust us, we're independent” is not a firewall. Ours has structure:

(a) Methodology is committed to git, not negotiated commercially. Our scoring formula, source weights, and per-block compositions live in source code reviewed by engineers, not in pricing discussions with brands. Every change is timestamped and visible on the /changelog page.

(b) Brands present in UFFILIATES.me cannot earn affiliate revenue through IndexFair. IndexFair currently places no affiliate-tagged outbound links for any brand. Visit-site CTAs, where shown, are direct official-site links. For UFFILIATES-partnered operators the conflict is also firewalled in code and disclosed on /policies/firewall: the brand page still carries the methodology score and editorial content, plus a firewall disclosure next to the neutral official-site link. Their score is calculated by the same methodology as every other brand we rate. We make no commission from sending you there.

The list of UFFILIATES-partnered brands is maintained at /policies/firewall and is enforced at the code level. Membership on that list is changed only via an audit-logged admin action, not an ad hoc editorial override — see /policies/firewall §4 for the verification mechanism.

(c) Commercial revenue does NOT influence ratings. The score is computed first, against our published methodology. No commercial relationship can raise or lower a published score.

(d) The data layer is the same data layer. When operators appear in both IndexFair (rated) and UFFILIATES (CPA partners), the underlying data — license status, regulator events, review aggregation — comes from the same primary sources every other brand uses. We do not pull “favourable” data from operator-provided feeds; everything is sourced from regulator registers and complaints, review platforms, app stores, public forums, and social media. The exact category mix varies by brand, country, and vertical and is disclosed on the relevant evidence surface.

We do not claim:

• That our founders have never worked with operators. They have. Konstantin spent four years inside Betfair's commercial team and held senior growth roles at three other operators. That experience is what makes our methodology robust against the internal narratives operators tell themselves.
• That UFFILIATES will never have UK partners. It already does (several UFFILIATES partner brands operate in the UK market). The firewall is structural precisely because the alternative — pretending no overlap exists — would be untenable as the industry consolidates.
• That all of our editorial decisions will please every operator. They will not. The methodology will mark some operators down, and we will not soften the score because of a commercial relationship elsewhere.

The exclusion list of UFFILIATES-partnered brands is public at /policies/firewall. Each listed brand page renders a firewall disclosure next to its neutral official-site link. Readers can verify enforcement by opening a listed brand and confirming that disclosure appears and that the outbound link is not affiliate-tagged — the methodology score is rendered; no affiliate revenue path exists through IndexFair for that brand.

If you believe the firewall has been breached, the dispute process is published on /policies/reviews and reachable through /privacy/contact with the “DMCC dispute / operator correction” category. We commit to a 14-day acknowledgement and 30-day resolution SLA per our publisher accountability framework — see /policies/reviews §5 for the full dispute SLA.

• B2B analytics and market intelligence (intended model): subscriptions and evidence products for non-rated buyers (payment providers, investors, media, researchers) and — under published caps — rated brands purchasing analytics of their own performance and of the market. A rated-brand purchase is named on the public subscriber register and can never move a score.
• Affiliate links today: none. IndexFair does not place affiliate-tagged outbound links on rating surfaces. Official-site CTAs are direct.
• Related products (planned or free): embeddable live score badges, API access for risk/compliance workflows, and historical evidence export for authorised buyers.

We do not, and will not, accept:

• Payments to alter ratings.
• “Featured operator” placements that bypass the methodology.
• Sponsored content disguised as editorial.
• Reciprocal cross-promotion deals with rated brands.

If we ever change this policy, it will be announced on the /changelog page with the date of change and the rationale.