NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--PredictionStrike, the marketplace on which users can trade shares of their favorite athletes, today announced a $3M seed round, led by MaC Venture Capital, with additional participation from Sixty8 Capital and multiple angel investors. On top of growth, the capital will fund additional product features that will be housed under the company’s premium membership offering, which will launch in the fall of 2022.
“We’re proud to be a part of this next chapter with PredictionStrike as we fully believe in its potential to scale—supporting this company was an easy decision,” said Marlon Nichols, Co-Founder and Managing General Partner of MaC Venture Capital. “We’re confident in PredictionStrike’s success due to its creative model that focuses on the relationship between technology and the world of sports.”
Coinciding with the start of the NFL season, PredictionStrike is excited to announce its long-awaited premium membership. New features focus on social engagement—including friends, leaderboards, and a reward-based referral program, on top of the advanced trading features that users have been desiring. Ahead of the World Cup, soccer players will be added to the platform, followed by athletes in women’s basketball, tennis, and golf.
PredictionStrike is heading into a new busy season, fresh off a strong year, in which they processed $15M+ in transactions and grew to 100K+ users. The team has built a novel, yet intuitive, approach to fan engagement that allows users to ‘invest’ in the journeys of their favorite athletes. While daily fantasy sports and gambling engage users in short term, all-or-nothing events, and NFTs are subject to volatile user sentiment, PredictionStrike attracts users to a platform they inherently understand.
The stocks move based on two factors:
1) Real world performance: If an athlete performs better than projected, the stock price goes up.
2) User demand: If other users are buying up shares of an athlete, the stock price goes up.
This setup has been praised by both users and veterans of the industry, who have seen other companies fail because of a lack of emphasis on either or both of these two features. The PredictionStrike team has always understood that users would need a reason to check their portfolios often, even if they were investing with a long-term mindset. For that reason, the performance angle of the stock movement stems from the idea that each game could be an earnings report – a way to measure each athlete’s journey in dollars and cents.
As investing has gained popularity over the past few years from things like NFTs, collectibles, wine, etc., PredictionStrike saw an opportunity in allowing people to invest in everyone’s favorite pastime—sports. Three times more people play fantasy sports than invest in financial markets, and PredictionStrike was quick to come up with a way to bridge the market.
“PredictionStrike was made for the person that is passionate about sports and wants to use their knowledge to invest,” said Deven Hurt, Co-Founder and CEO of PredictionStrike. “We are proud to close this next round of fundraising and look forward to expanding the app with new features and new sports.”
After founding PredictionStrike in 2019, the team raised a $1.7M pre-seed round in 2021 and shortly thereafter launched their latest app. A passionate community and the addition of new sports to the platform contributed to the fervor, but nothing was as widely loved as the relationships PredictionStrike formed with athletes.
When the team launched their MMA product, they partnered with VaynerSports to engage past and present UFC fighters. The fighters, including Daniel Cormier, Chris Weidman, Maycee Barber, Anthony Smith, Urijah Faber, Cory Sandhagen, Josh Emmet, and Kevin Holland, created content and interacted with users in exchange for shares of their own stock. The content ranges from promotional videos to “shareholder meetings,” in which the athletes are interviewed about their performance, their future, and their potential, similar to traditional shareholder meetings for companies in the financial stock markets.
Athletes currently don’t have a platform that they benefit from financially but PredictionStrike wants to change that and show users that this is the best way to invest in their favorite athletes.
For more information, please visit predictionstrike.com.
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About PredictionStrike
Founded in 2019, PredictionStrike created a new way for fans to invest in and engage with their favorite athletes by trading virtual shares of them as if they were stocks. The platform operates like a real stock market and allows users to buy/sell shares, build portfolios, and operate in a live market using real money. Share prices are determined by a player's real-world performance, where each game/match acts like an earnings report, as well as the fans' demand for those shares. The company has seen enormous growth since the return of sports after the 2020 COVID hiatus, completing over $15M worth of transactions since then. For more information, visit predictionstrike.com and follow PredictionStrike on Instagram and Twitter.
About MaC Venture Capital
MaC Venture Capital is a seed-stage venture capital firm based in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley that invests in technology startups leveraging shifts in cultural trends and behaviors. The general partners represent diverse backgrounds in technology, business, politics, entertainment, and finance, allowing them to accelerate entrepreneurs on the verge of their breakthrough moment. The firm provides hands-on support crucial for building and scaling category-leading companies, including operations strategy, brand building, recruiting, sales development, and mission-critical introductions. MaC Venture Capital is the result of a merger between Cross Culture Ventures, co-founded by Marlon Nichols, and M Ventures, co-founded by Adrian Fenty, Michael Palank, and Charles D. King. Find MaC Venture Capital online at macventurecapital.com and @MaCVentureCap.
