Bettors don't have a shortage of opinions telling them what to bet. What they don't have is an easy way to check whether any of those opinions hold up. Rithmm, the personalized predictive-analytics platform for sports betting, is closing that gap with Scout, an AI betting copilot now live inside the Rithmm app.
Scout sits on top of Rithmm's existing prediction models rather than replacing them. Ask it about a specific game, player, or bet, and it returns the pick, where the edge might be, the data behind it, and why the bet does or doesn't make sense. From there it keeps going: ask a follow-up question, tell it you only like road dogs, and it builds on the answer instead of sending users back to a spreadsheet.
Rithmm founder and CEO Megan Lanham was describing this exact product before it existed. On Episode 81 of the Betting Startups podcast (published September 4, 2023), she said her long-term dream was for someone to ask "who does your model have tonight" instead of texting a buddy for a pick.
"Scout was born directly out of that dream," Lanham tells BettingStartups. "It wasn't a pivot, it's the same thesis we've had since day one." The company actually tried an early version of Scout and pulled back, she says, because the underlying tech wasn't mature enough and the unit economics didn't work yet. The team held off shipping the front end until they could do it without cutting corners on the modeling underneath.
That patience shapes how Lanham frames Scout's role in the business. Rithmm's original product let bettors build their own predictive models; Scout doesn't replace that engine so much as open a second way into it. Casual and recreational bettors were never going to build a model themselves, she says, but they still want the same underlying edge, so Scout works as "a second front door into the exact same modeling engine," letting Rithmm serve both ends of the market off one core asset instead of building two separate products.
Early numbers back that up: daily usage is climbing, and Pro-tier signups tied to Scout are running ahead of the company's own forecast. That's the metric Lanham cares about most, proof, in her words, that it's "converting into paid upgrades faster than we modeled."
Lanham is emphatic that Scout isn't a bolt-on feature: it's a reasoning and delivery layer built on Rithmm's own proprietary models, not a wrapper around a general-purpose chatbot, and the company already has a V2 mapped out. The pitch, as she describes it, is a flywheel: every question Scout answers generates the exact usage data that shapes what Rithmm builds next.
The goal is making that conversational layer the default way anyone interacts with sports data and models.
