Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Hypepotamus. It is published on Global Atlanta as part of our content partnership with the Southeast’s top source for innovation news. Sign up for Hypepotamus newsletters here.
The second most popular sport on the planet is having a moment in the United States.
The US has been playing co-host to the Men’s Cricket World Cup this summer, spurring “unprecedented interest” among a new crop of cricket fans, according to the sport’s administrative body.
That has brought more opportunities to Atlanta-based startup StatX Sports. The AI and sport-focused startup, founded by Shawn Tucker and David Lu, looks to improve how popular fantasy apps, betting platforms, and sportsbooks provide better betting odds and live data.
StatX is making it possible for platforms to get into microbetting for cricket, meaning they have the data needed to make bets in real-time during a match. Tucker told Hypepotamus that their target customers today are sportsbooks looking to build out their cricket offerings after increased inbound interest in the World Cup, which wraps up this weekend.
“Most sportsbooks two years ago didn’t care much about cricket and only offered bets on which team was going to win the match. With the increase in global cricket betting volumes (10x over the last 4 years) we’re seeing a lot of interest in offering many types of pre-match and in-game bets for cricket matches,” he added.
But Tucker sees opportunities for the platform to move into other “second tier” sports, like Formula 1 racing and women’s basketball, as they see surges in interest and betting volumes.
StatX gets its live game data from open source providers and feeds from across the world. Tucker said the platform’s “special sauce” is how it takes that data and “[enables] sportsbooks to provide hundreds of different props for their users to bet on before and during cricket matches.”
“As far as we know, we’re the first to provide microbetting for cricket,” he added.
Tucker, who grew up in Atlanta and graduated from the University of Georgia, worked at Uber, KPMG,= and YP before joining the hedge fund Athanor Capital. While he researched and covered many different industries for the fund, one that captured his interest was the sports betting and gambling space. He’s also an avid sports fan and athlete himself, playing basketball and baseball growing up.
He met his now co-founder Lu when they both worked at Athanor Capital.
As a first-time tech founder, Tucker said that launching StatX has been anything but an easy road. But two years into business, its third product has found traction in the B2B SaaS world.
“We started with a B2C product, and we realized that it takes a ton of capital to get to the scale you need to be profitable. It likely would have taken years to get to break-even unit economics, and in the current fundraising environment I’m not sure it would have been possible. By switching to B2B SaaS, we now expect to hit break-even by the end of the year and our TAM is still in the billions and growing rapidly,” Tucker added.
Investors have taken note of StatX’s potential in the B2B space. The team recently secured a $600k pre-seed round to continue to grow its platform. Two investors in the round include Ike Greenstein, David Grice and Parvinder Thiara.
