Unifying the fragmented sports data stack, with Amar Rao of SportsStack

Every sportsbook, fantasy app and prediction market depends on sports data feeds, and swapping or combining providers is still painful. Amar Rao ran into that problem at numberFire, FanDuel and Fanatics, and co-founded SportsStack, a unified data platform for sports. He explains the product to the Betting Startups Podcast.

In this episode

• Rao says every time the official NFL or NBA data provider changed, swapping pipes and mapping and cleaning data took months, "sometimes up to 6 months" (8:38).

• SportsStack supports "over 30" providers and can turn around a new feed provider in a week or two (10:41, 10:58).

• On settlement, he says some books lose "north of like 5, 10, $20 million a year" on regrades alone (13:14).

• Prediction markets cannot claw money back and must pay out both sides, so they sit at the cautious end of the speed-versus-accuracy trade-off (14:32).

• Underdog and Novig use SportsStack for mappings and the settlement API as they expand into prediction markets (16:47).

• He rejects the idea that data is consolidating into two or three providers, and says market makers, not prediction markets, now need the top-quality data (24:31, 26:27).

Episode from the Betting Startups Podcast, published on YouTube.