Matt Bresler went to the sharks to finance Odditt, his Las Vegas-based sports betting tech startup.
Not pool sharks, loan sharks or the wealthy investors known as sharks on the TV show “Shark Tank.” But prehistoric sharks.
Bresler, a native of Lexington, Mass., started a fossil business in high school after spotting giant shark teeth for sale during a family trip to South Carolina. Fascinated, he began collecting and repairing fossils, then turned to eBay when he ran out of money.
“I just sort of stumbled into a business. I actually started to make some money, which blew my mind that I could make money on the internet,” he said. “I continued scaling it from there and by the end I was brokering full skeletons for international clients and going to trade shows where there are T. rex skeletons for sale.”
He ran the fossil business for seven years before leaving Tufts University in Boston at age 21 and using the proceeds to bootstrap Odditt, a B2B software company that sells automated betting content to sportsbooks, platform providers and affiliates.
Bresler, 25, who was named one of the gaming industry’s “20 in their 20s” at G2E in Las Vegas, launched Odditt in 2021. He relocated to Las Vegas in 2024, when he raised the preseed round of funding and hired Elaine Milardo as CTO and co-founder.
Milardo was DraftKings’ first data hire and grew the sports betting giant’s data platform team into more than 100 engineers.
Odditt has built software that automatically generates more than 100,000 contextualized bets and prepackaged parlays per day across 115 leagues in 45 countries using more than 25 years of historical data.
“There is a lot of fun to be had in sports betting and building a better parlay product is the first step in that,” Bresler said. “The most valuable product in sports betting is a parlay. The problem is that, increasingly, the customer that comes into a sportsbook doesn’t already know what parlay they want to put together. They’re basically just staring at a blank screen. That’s really what we solve at the end of the day.
“We have a story-driven prepackaged parlay product, so we are able to offer embeddable, scrollable and swipeable content experiences where every bet is wrapped in fun facts, historical trends and storylines that the user can interact with and understand.”
Parlay profit margins
A parlay is a wager that groups two or more individual picks, or legs, into a single bet where every selection must win. It gives gamblers the chance to bet a little to win a lot, which is why parlays are one of the most popular wagers for the betting public.
They’re also the most profitable bet for sportsbooks, which have an average hold percentage, or profit margin, of 20 to 30 percent on parlays compared with about 5 percent on straight bets. In general, parlays account for about 30 percent of the betting handle, or amount wagered, at U.S. sportsbooks but generate roughly 60 percent of the profits.
Despite the high profit margin, books still usually offer only a few dozen or so prepackaged parlays. Odditt wants to fill that void.
“We’ve had to build our own proprietary sports entertainment data infrastructure to facilitate this,” Bresler said. “That’s why Elaine is able to fully automate something that generates 100,000 thematic parlays a day, whereas a FanDuel or DraftKings is building 50 of them manually that everyone sees.”
Odditt proved its parlay product through Betflow, a consumer sportsbook affiliate app it launched last year that helps users explore bets using personalized options that match their interests, risk tolerance and style.
“About 80 percent of the bets that we send to sportsbooks are parlays, whereas it’s only about 30 percent, generally, in the U.S.,” Bresler said. “So we’re able to achieve about a 2.5 times increase because you can place it in one click and you are telling people exactly why they should care about that parlay.”
Partnerships
Odditt announced a partnership in July with Optimove, a leading customer data platform used by the world’s leading iGaming operators and sportsbooks.
Operators using Optimove will soon be able to embed in messages to players Odditt’s story-driven bets tied to their favorite teams, leagues and interests.
“With Optimove, operators already know who to message, when, and with what tone,” said Meryl Serouya, Optimove’s senior director of global partnerships, in a statement. “Odditt lets us take personalization a step further — into the bet itself, so every message can carry a pick built around what that player actually follows. It’s a new layer of relevance we’re excited to bring to our operators.”
Odditt also announced an agreement in June with Amelco, a sportsbook platform provider for some of the world’s biggest betting brands, including Hard Rock and Fanatics. Amelco purchased Odditt’s historical odds data to test its own models.
“What Odditt is building is the kind of infrastructure the next era of sports betting is going to be built on, and we are excited to be working with them,” Amelco COO Leon Wynne said in a statement.
Odditt is raising a $1.5 million seed round to accelerate operator integrations and scale its engineering and sales teams.
“It’s very difficult to build at scale,” Milardo said. “There are over 100 different attributes of a particular bet and they range from the team, player, rivalry, location, weather, mascots, you name it. Basically it takes this massive repository of interconnected information and it’s a series of algorithms and evaluations to pick out a parlay that is a fun parlay.
“It really engages folks on a more fannish level. It’s betting but it’s fun. We have an emoji to parlay converter. We have a data structure that will allow us to do a lot of different things. This is one of many that’s in our product pipeline and we are really excited about this because we think it’s going to introduce more entertaining ways to do sports betting to a larger population.”
Contact reporter Todd Dewey at [email protected]. Follow @tdewey33 on X.
