Last week, Fast Draft and FantasySpin announced they are merging into a single company, combining FantasySpin's daily fantasy product with Fast Draft's best ball platform under the Fast Draft name. FantasySpin CEO Steve "Dakota" Happas will lead the combined business, while Fast Draft founder Matt Kelley will serve as president. The deal expands the combined footprint to 38 U.S. states and Canada, while pairing two operators that together booked more than $1M in contest entries in their first year.
But beyond the headline are two teams that have known each other for years. Kelley first met the FantasySpin founders at an FSGA conference, well before the product had been launched, when he and Fast Draft COO Billy Muzio were trying to figure out the basics of running a regulated gaming business—geolocation vendors, KYC, which banks would even take their call. The two teams exchanged notes, and the relationship compounded from there.
"In the marketing department you have a strength and we have a strength, and combining them we're like Voltron," Kelley said on The BettingStartups Podcast, describing how the merger conversation evolved. "This merger could almost be like a class in MBA school about synergies."
Fast Draft launched in summer 2024 after Kelley spent a decade building a tech company in Washington, D.C. and then a separate fantasy media business, PlayerProfiler—a roughly $1M business with about 20,000 subscribers and 10M+ annual site visits.
He raised $2M million to build Fast Draft and take it to market, getting it licensed state by state. The pitch was a modernized, mobile-first take on fantasy: best ball drafts that finish in five minutes instead of an hour, a “Flex 4” format aimed at the 60-million-plus fantasy gamer base, an in-app portfolio section to absorb the work normally done in third-party tools, and a turbo mode that drafts entire lineups automatically.
What unites the two companies, in Kelley's view, is a deliberate refusal to bolt fantasy onto a betting product. The DraftKings and FanDuel-style apps, he argues, have turned fantasy into a customer acquisition tool buried five menus deep, leaving a gap for operators that actually want to build for fantasy players.
"We're not building a Trojan horse app that says it's fantasy, but it's actually betting," Kelley said.
That statement reflects a broader observation of the market. Fantasy incumbents like DraftKings and FanDuel pivoted to sports betting once PASPA fell, which ceded space to PrizePicks and Underdog to capture part of the market. And now, with prediction markets, companies are once again shuffling resources and attention to a new category and customer. Fast Draft and FantasySpin, he argues, are betting that the underlying fantasy audience of 60M+ North Americans is worth recommitting to.
"DFS 3.0 is less spreadsheets and more friends," Kelley said. “We're trying to make fantasy great again.”
The first integration priority is a unified wallet so users can deposit once and play across both apps. Next is rolling Fast Draft into NBA, F1, and Premier League contests, and expanding FantasySpin's real-money DFS (currently live in 24 states plus D.C.) into more markets. A new seed round for the combined business is launching shortly.
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