A data startup working with Formula 1 raised $5 million to expand betting on niche and emerging sports
Todd Ballard
- ALT Sports Data gathers data on niche sports so sportsbooks can create bets.
- The company, which works with leagues like Formula 1, just raised $5 million in seed funding.
- Its CMO broke down the company's business pillars that it says drive fan engagement.
ALT Sports Data, founded by GoPro alums Joe Dunnigan and Todd Ballard, announced Monday that it secured $5 million in funding.
The company is trying to expand betting around new and emerging sports like Formula 1. It works with sports leagues and sportsbook operators to provide the data that underpins bets. It's also working on other ways to engage fans of niche sports.
ALT Sports Data competes with big sports data providers like Sportradar and Genius Sports, which work with major leagues such as the NBA and NFL. The startup aims to set itself apart by prioritizing niche and lifestyle sports that its competitors aren't focusing on.
"There are a lot of leagues out there that are not the NFL, the MLB, the NBA, that, quite frankly, I feel have been systemically set up for failure in sports betting because there's just no real innovation or thought put into them," Ballard, ALT Sports Data's chief marketing officer, told Business Insider.
ALT Sports Data works with sports such as Formula 1, which recently made the company its official betting supplier, X Games, and the World Surf League. Sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings use ALT Sports Data.
Ballard said these lifestyle sports have massive fan bases, but not much representation on sportsbooks.
"Why can't we bet on a bunch of these sports like surfing and motocross?" Ballard said.
The company plans to use its fresh funding to create more tools and partnerships to help make sports more engaging.
Eberg Capital and Relay Ventures co-led ALT Sports Data's seed round, including participation from Motley Fool Ventures, Scrum Ventures, and other individual investors.
ALT Sports Data's strategy to drive sports fan engagement
Ballard said ALT Sports Data has four pillars of its business that help drive sports betting and fan engagement.
Its league services include data rights deals, marketing, integrity, and other work with sports rights owners. Ballard said the company has about 25 sports and leagues in its ecosystem, including combat, motor, action, and niche sports.
The product arm supports those league relationships with data science, distribution, infrastructure, and game development.
"How are we driving more meaningful relationships with leagues?" said Ballard. He said, in some cases, the company will build the back-end data infrastructure for a league to support betting.
The company also has a media division with its own affiliate site, NXTbets. The site uses content to direct people to sports betting platforms, similar to what companies like Catena Media and Better Collective do. Ballard said NXTbets has become a "fairly substantial" piece of the business.
The company is also working on creating its own games to expand from sports betting into areas like social, peer-to-peer, daily fantasy, and free-to-play games.
"We're not saying we want to exclusively create games just for us," Ballard said. "We do think we can show how it should be done."
ALT Sports Data is building something for fans who aren't into more popular sports enough to bet on them outside a big event, like the Super Bowl or March Madness. Its approach targets bringing these fans into the sports betting ecosystem in sports they care about, like surfing or the X Games, and then getting them comfortable betting on sports more broadly.
"Emerging niche sports have these massive audiences behind them that are pretty passionate, and give the leagues a new point of engagement, a new opportunity to drive more fans to their sport, and ultimately drive new revenue streams into them," Ballard said.