Blitz:Draft thinks fantasy sports can be more entertaining if it drops the complexity and just becomes faster.
The startup, led by co-founder and CEO Toby Bucsescu, is building a swipe-based fantasy experience designed to strip away the friction that has defined the category for years. After launching its iOS app in the U.S. last year with short-form MLB contests, the company has expanded into NFL and NBA, and continues to lean into a product vision centered on speed, simplicity, and repeat play.
“Blitz:Draft is fantasy sports times Tinder, times speed chess,” Bucsescu said on the BettingStartups Podcast. “We want to give the users back their time while giving them more fun.”
At the core of the product is a two-minute draft mechanic. Users are shown one player at a time and swipe right to select or left to pass—removing the need for long lobbies, research-heavy builds, or drawn-out drafts that can take hours. The result is a format that encourages volume and variety, with each draft delivering a different experience.
“We have users who’ve drafted five times in a day, and each time it’s a different experience,” Bucsescu said.
That emphasis on speed extends beyond the draft itself. Blitz:Draft caps contest sizes at 10 entrants and limits users to a single entry per contest—a deliberate move to level the playing field and push back against the multi-entry, optimizer-heavy ecosystem that dominates traditional DFS.
“It’s the sharks who are in there with a hundred entries and using a script to draft the optimal lineups who are really taking home those prizes,” Bucsescu said.
Instead, Blitz:Draft is positioning itself as a more accessible, casual-friendly alternative—one that still retains enough depth to keep experienced players engaged. The product also introduces time-based tiebreakers, rewarding users who draft faster, and layers in weekly leaderboards to drive ongoing engagement.
The early signs are promising. According to Bucsescu, users played an average of seven contests per week during the company’s first NFL season, with retention north of 30%—strong signals for a product still in its early innings.
But the bigger opportunity, in his view, lies in expanding the addressable market for fantasy sports altogether.
“We believe the market for DFS is way bigger than the 53 million user number that gets thrown around a lot,” he said. “There’s a lot of people on the sideline, a lot of casual players on the sideline, and we believe they are there for the taking.”
Blitz:Draft is building for those users, fans who find traditional fantasy too time-consuming or intimidating, while also trying to reintroduce a social layer that has faded from the category. Part of that strategy includes bringing the product offline, with plans to host live “Blitz nights” at bars and venues where users can draft together in real time.
“We’ve gone to bars one-on-one and shown the app to people, and the reaction has been incredible,” Bucsescu said.
The longer-term roadmap includes expanding into season-long formats with weekly redrafts, as well as private leagues and user-generated contests—features designed to blend the stickiness of traditional fantasy with the speed of Blitz’s core experience.
