ParlayX wins First Pitch at SBC Summit Americas 2026

Before last week’s SBC conference, Andrew Gonzalez had never delivered a pitch. He left anyway with $100,000.

ParlayX, Gonzalez's institutional infrastructure play for prediction markets, was named the winner of First Pitch at SBC Summit Americas in Fort Lauderdale on June 11—taking home a prize package valued at over $100,000 after beating four other finalists from across the industry.

The company describes itself as a middleware routing layer for institutions looking to access prediction markets without building the underlying blockchain infrastructure themselves. Rather than having each institution piece together their own connections to venues like Kalshi or Polymarket and hire a crypto dev team, ParlayX provides a single integration point, an OTC network for counterparty trading, and the compliance and tax reporting that institutional clients expect. Gonzalez's reference point for what he's building: Bloomberg or Fireblocks, but for prediction markets.

The pitch itself went through significant evolution before landing on that framing, Gonzalez told us on the showroom floor. He and co-founder Antonio Cosio spent the weeks and days before the competition stripping out complexity—repositioning the product away from "execution infrastructure" language toward something judges could immediately grasp. "That doesn't really make sense to most people," Gonzalez said of the original framing. "Like, what does that even mean?" Two hours before the competition, the two were still running through the deck, cutting anything that didn't land cleanly.

The market context underpins the urgency. Gonzalez estimates annualized prediction market trading volume is roughly $300B—a figure he says institutions are eyeing but can't easily access today. Most of ParlayX's current clients are sports betting syndicates, but the longer-term build is aimed at a much broader institutional base.

ParlayX incorporated in November and Gonzalez left his role at Flow Desk, a large market maker, in January to go full-time. The company is expecting to launch with four institutional partners in the week following the competition—the win arriving at a moment of genuine operational momentum rather than just early promise.

ParlayX joins a small, but growing, list of startups who’ve claimed the First Pitch crown. That includes soccer analytics company AIstats in Lisbon 2025, Wager Games at the Americas 2025 edition, among others.

The live pitch competition has a track record of spotlighting companies that go on to matter in the industry. Earlier this year, Scrimmage, winner of the 2023 First Pitch competition, was acquired by Xtremepush to help power its loyalty platform.

In just a few month’s time, the industry will once again reconvene for SBC Summit Lisbon where yet another class of startups will take the stage for First Pitch. Applications will open soon.

In the meantime, you can catch our full conversation with Gonzalez fresh after his first-place finish on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.