Sports betting technology company Outlier, which has a five-person office in downtown New Orleans, has announced the close of a $10.7 million funding round.
The company, founded in 2023 in Austin, Texas, runs a sports betting analytics platform that’s designed to help subscribers make smarter, data-driven decisions.
Outlier co-founder and CEO Evan Kirkham said the company will use its new funding to scale its platform, expand its subscriber base, and continue building its team in New Orleans and elsewhere.
The round includes $5.7 million in equity financing from Discerning Capital, a three-year-old venture capital firm based in Las Vegas. The additional $5 million comes in the form of a line of credit from Discerning’s House Advantage Fund.
Outlier was created in 2023 when partners Kirkham, Luis Lafer-Sousa and Peter Reggio pivoted from their first venture, a sports talk app called Colorcast that debuted four years earlier.
The original company, which pre-dated ESPN’s popular “ManningCast” featuring New Orleans sports heroes Peyton and Eli Manning, allowed users to turn down their TVs and listen to alternative broadcasters provide play-by-play and analysis of games.
Now, the trio’s new venture provides subscribers — who pay between $20 and $80 a month — information, statistics and research related to pro baseball, football and basketball as well as some college sports.
The partners founded the company to take advantage of the growing sports betting industry, which is now legal in nearly 40 states.
Kirkham describes the Outlier platform as a kind of “betting coach,” designed to highlight potentially profitable bets in plain language, and with charts, maps and other user-friendly visuals designed to make complicated information easier to digest.
The goal is to make it easier to research bets, which can require studying stats on dozens if not hundreds of websites and digging up data from sports books — the companies that accept bets on the outcomes of sporting events — to see how similar bets have panned out in the past. Outlier then presents the information to its subscribers in easily digestible ways.
“You can make the most informed bet of your life in under a minute,” Kirkham said.
The company says it has hundreds of thousands of users in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
Kirkham and Reggio live and work in Austin, where there are few other employees. Lafer-Sousa leads the bigger team in New Orleans, where he moved four years ago to be closer to his wife’s family. The Outlier office is at the corner of Julia and Carondelet streets in the Warehouse District
Outlier is participating in a state tax credit program that provides up to 25% cash rebate on payroll expenses and 18% rebate on some production costs.
GNO Inc. President and CEO Michael Hecht said in a statement that Outlier is “helping position Louisiana as a national leader in sports data and betting technology.”
