The Unified Data Platform for Sports

We have been quietly building SportsStack for the last two years. This week we are officially coming out of stealth, and the first place I talked about it publicly was with Jesse on the Betting Startups Podcast. I have been a longtime listener, so it was a fun one to do. Here is the episode and a recap of what we covered.

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Why I started SportsStack

I have been building in sports tech for over 13 years. I started at Amazon, then joined some college friends as an early employee at numberFire, which FanDuel acquired. I spent about ten years at FanDuel, ending up as head of tech for the fantasy vertical, and then left to help start the Fanatics Sportsbook as VP of Engineering, taking it from zero to one, launching the first states, and helping ship the cross-vertical Fanatics app.

The idea for SportsStack actually came to me at FanDuel. It was probably the third or fourth product I had built, and every time the same problem showed up: data providers are fragmented, and there is no standardization across any of them. Each one has its own IDs, its own formats, its own way of handling seasons and edge cases. LeBron James has a completely different ID in every system, and it is on you to merge them so your customers get one coherent experience.

“I found myself having to rebuild this type of layer over and over again. We had teams of engineers working on this problem around the clock, and I would argue we still were not investing enough in it.”

At Fanatics we had different business units trying to get DFS and sportsbook IDs to line up, and it was annoying, expensive, and hard to maintain. That was the light bulb: this is a costly commodity that every company has to get right to scale, and it should exist as a third-party service instead of something each team hacks together.

What SportsStack is

SportsStack is the unified data platform for sports. One integration gives you universal IDs, lets you plug in any data provider, and gives you confidence in your data before a user sees it or you settle a market. It is for anyone building in sports tech: operators, prediction markets, sports media, fantasy platforms, even teams and leagues. If you are working with sports data, we want to be the default solution.

The Unified API: the last integration you have to do

The Unified API solves one fundamental challenge: I want to add or switch a data provider without building and maintaining the pipes and the mapping forever. You integrate once, get a normalized schema and universal IDs, and can turn on a new provider without writing new code. Your downstream services should just work.

I cannot tell you how many times the official NFL or NBA data provider has changed hands. The commercial team says this provider is out and that one is in, and the engineering team spends months, sometimes six, mapping and cleaning data so customers do not notice. We also once had a provider go down for three weeks during the NFL season. That was extremely costly, and it taught us how important backups and seamless switching are. We are building the enterprise data infrastructure I wish we had, and making it available to everyone.

• Over 30 providers supported today, from top-tier feeds to cheap and free sources, across scores and stats, odds, projections, and media content.
• Bring your own API keys for most providers; we can resell data from some.
• New providers typically turn around in a week or two.

Settlement: where data turns into money

Settlement is the final step where a sportsbook or prediction market takes data and turns it into money. Say I bet the over on LeBron's first-quarter assists at 3.5. At the end of the quarter, the book has to decide whether that hit. The problem is that data providers are sometimes wrong. People at the stadium collect stats manually, someone fat-fingers a number, or an official stat correction comes in later. Multiply that across every market, every stat, every league, and it is an enormous operational challenge.

When a market is settled incorrectly, you either claw the money back, which is a terrible customer experience, or you pay out both sides, which is expensive. Prediction markets cannot claw back at all, so they sit at the cautious end of the spectrum, but every operator is balancing speed against accuracy.

“I have talked to lots of books, and people are losing north of five, ten, twenty million dollars a year on regrades alone.”

It has not been solved because it is expensive to build and maintain, and most engineering investment goes to expansion. Our Settlement API cross-validates data across multiple sources, gives you a confidence score on every market and every stat, flags discrepancies and providers with a history of corrections, and tells you whether to hold or settle. Each client gets a customized risk profile, and the recommendations plug into your existing settlement engine.

Who we are working with

Mapping resonates with everyone who has built in this industry, so the Unified API funnel is always on. The competition is not another vendor. It is the in-house system you hacked together over the years. The Settlement API launched this year and has had great traction. Underdog and Novig are both working with us today, from mappings to the Settlement API, including preventing misgrades as they expand into prediction markets.

On the capital side, we recently closed a small angel round after self-funding the business through zero to one. Betting Startups Capital is part of it, which Jesse announced on the episode. We will raise more when it helps us get to the vision faster, not for the sake of raising.

On the data ecosystem

People often assume the provider market is consolidating around two or three big names. I do not think that is true. Hyper-specialized providers are capturing new data points, new stats, and new niche sports that the big players are not incentivized to go deep on, and fans of those sports are underserved. That fragmentation is exactly why I am bullish on what we are building.

The other shift is prediction markets. Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket do not need the same data a traditional sportsbook needed to set lines. That burden has moved to market makers, who now need even more breadth, depth, and unique data sets to win on price.

What is next

Over the next year the big theme is the settlement engine: being the best in the industry at giving operators high-quality recommendations regardless of sport or market type, while adding providers, lowering latency, and improving accuracy. In five years, I see SportsStack as the default infrastructure layer between every sports data provider and every product built on top of them, with the tooling and operational practices to match, so that everything a customer sees is something the company can put its stamp on.