Snapp raises $4.6M to build sports AI for teams and fans

The news: Snapp, a San Francisco startup building AI for sports, has raised $4.6M from a16z Speedrun, Dorm Room Fund, Gold House Ventures, House Fund, and Valia Ventures. Angels in the round include Caviar founders Jason Wang and Andy Zhang, Nextdoor founder and CTO Prakash Janakiraman, and Cognition CEO Jeff Wang.

Zoom in: Snapp sells an enterprise platform to professional sports teams and runs consumer apps with more than 20,000 users, and CEO Shawn Tsao said on LinkedIn that college programs like Cal Football use its Snapp Stats for Teams product. Its AI draws on 30+ live data feeds and connects to 30+ sportsbooks and prediction markets, including Kalshi and Polymarket, to flag mispriced lines and arbitrage opportunities. Tsao previously co-founded Caviar, which he scaled through its acquisition by Square.

Why it matters: “AI models are great at answering static questions, but sports move in real time,” a16z Speedrun general manager Josh Lu said in a press statement. Snapp claims its AI outperforms frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI on sports questions across the NFL, NBA, MLB, and nine other leagues. It’s selling one data stack to two audiences: the front offices building rosters and the fans betting on and drafting their players.

The news: October brought fewer rounds and bigger checks, with $14.7M in disclosed funding across five rounds (one undisclosed), up from September’s $8.95M across eight. Most of the money went to infrastructure, and prediction markets went from seven of September’s eight rounds to two, according to our internal tracking.

Zoom in: Maincard led the month with a $7M round for its white-label iGaming platform, which has crossed $5M in annualized revenue and is putting the money into the US. Furnace raised $3.5M led by North Island Ventures to build reference data for prediction markets, and CRSHMARKET raised a $3.5M seed led by 6MV for its livestream prediction market with 60-second settlements. On the M&A side, LOW6 acquired Brighton skill gaming company Splash Games to speed up the rollout of its Rivalz platform.

The news: Sparley Interactive co-founders Daniel Flesch and Elad Dvir joined the BettingStartups Podcast to talk about their studio’s fast, multiplayer games for lottery, bingo, and soft casino operators. A Sparley game lasts 15 to 45 seconds, compared with three and a half to five minutes for a round of online bingo, and is built with a Gen Z audience in mind.

Zoom in: The pair spent about 15 years running 888’s B2B bingo network before launching the studio about a year ago. Aggregators liked the games but couldn’t support the multiplayer tech, so Sparley built its own remote gaming server (RGS). Getting operators to commit was its own hurdle: “It’s always the middle of next year,” Dvir said of operator roadmaps.

Why it matters: Three games are market-ready, the first is expected to go live with an operator in Rwanda within two to four weeks, and Dvir said about five or six UK operators are waiting on the games once Sparley’s UK license comes through. The founders raised £220K from two UK angels, the first half of their pre-seed round, and are looking for the remaining £210K. “If we’re going to lose money here, we better lose as little as possible,” Dvir said, explaining why they took half when their lead investor offered more.

• 🆕 ProphetX is hiring four engineers across backend, DevOps, and QA to build out its sports prediction exchange, with salary plus equity for every role. Remote – USA. (View jobs)

• Betr is hiring a Lead Brand Designer to shape how its real-money gaming Super App looks, sounds, and feels. Miami, FL (On-site). (View job)

• Splash Sports is hiring a Lifecycle Marketing Manager to turn first-time depositors into habitual monthly players. United States – Remote. (View job)

• 🆕 BettingJobs is partnering with a multi-brand iGaming operator to find a Payments Acquiring & Processing Architect to build its own payment processor and card acquirer from the ground up. Remote. (View job)

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