Ankit Goyal and Alexander Monahan have traversed the business life cycle of many young sports betting entrepreneurs in the United States.
After attending the same Virginia high school and graduating from the same college, they took their own career paths - in Monahan’s case as a quant trader on Wall Street - until legal sports betting became a legal possibility nationally in 2018.
In 2021, they founded OddsJam, which provides tech tools to sports bettors including positive expected-value, arbitrage, and parlay-builders using real-time odds from more than 100 sportsbooks. Its daily fantasy applications include a popular lineup optimizer in conjunction with PrizePicks.
On Dec. 12, amid the continued great golden age of sports tech mergers and acquisitions, Goyal and Monahan announced a deal to sell OddsJam’s parent company to sports and casino affiliate Gambling.com.
According to a release, stockholders of Odds Holdings, Inc., will receive $80 million and possibly “up to an additional $80 million based on Odds Holdings’ business performance through the end of 2026.”
OddsJam will bring powerful financials to the deal, as it expects to generate revenue and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $26 million and $12 million, respectively. Gambling.com expects that figure to increase by at least 20 percent in 2025.
“It's a moment of joy and emotion and for me it was certainly emotional,” OddsJam CEO Matt Restivo told the Betting Startups podcast. “I've had a couple of startups that didn't hit at all. … I know for a fact that without those failures, this would not have happened.
“Perhaps that was a big contributor to the emotion I experienced in the last 72 hours.”
And maybe it soothed the emotions of the Monahan family, which was collectively aghast when Alex revealed to them his plan.
“I still remember calling my dad,” he recalled on the Betting Startups podcast. “I called my girlfriend at the time and was just like, ‘Yep, just quit my job.’ And they're just like, ‘You f—--- idiot.’”
“We knew there was opportunity in sports betting in general. Obviously, a lot of states have legalized since it launched, but we just kind of did it and didn't really make money for a while. But I worked. I'm pretty frugal, so is my co-founder. We had jobs. I wasn't worried I was gonna be on food stamps, something like that. I can always go get another job type of thing, is the way I viewed it. And it took us a while to kind of get it off the ground and get in rhythm.”
Gambling.com was obviously feeling that beat. The purchase increased its portfolio of websites to more than 50, in seven languages across 15 international markets.
Goyal, Monahan and Restivo will join the company’s board when the deal closes, reportedly on Jan. 1.
Admittedly reluctant to join the company a few years ago, Restivo was won over by the vision of the founders and the human capital OddsJam added to the foundation of technological savvy. The company wasn’t made to be sold off, he said, but there was admitted validation after the deal.
“When you're kind of cutting up a company or adding companies inside of companies, scaling - that was challenging - but 2023 turned out to be a banner year for us,” Restivo continued. “We started to think about, ‘How do people value this business?’
“That was never a question of like, ‘Hey, we're going to build this thing and sell it.’ It's more like, ‘How do we think about value?’ And I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs that I talk to and meet who are just like, ‘I just want to build something. … And then I want to sell it.’ It sounds so glorious to sell it.”
And it remains important, Restivo said, that OddsJam continues to deliver the product that made it so popular and valued. That, he said, made the months of negotiations that led to the sale stressful. Learning more about the executive leadership at Gambling.com - which has emerged as among the most financially successful in a rough era for affiliates - calmed concerns.
“[Goyal and Monahan] want to ensure that the survivability of the company is in good hands,” he said. “We spent many months getting to know the whole team at Gambling.com. It kept growing into the summer, kept growing into the football season.
“And finally things kind of came to a head early on in the football season. I guess it's hard to say quick close. I've only been a part of a few of these. But both our side and the Gambling.com side worked very hard, very tirelessly to get this deal done. And when you get into it, there's just a lot of details. But, obviously [we’re] certainly thrilled to get the outcome that we got.”
So now what? It’s on to the next thing, whatever that entails at Gambling.com Group.
“We're not buying new cars,” Restivo said. “We're just gonna put our heads down and keep grinding.”
