SpeedLabs, a New York-based sports technology startup, has raised a $6.5M seed round led by Parlay Capital Holdings to build what it's calling the real-time market engine for sports. Bullpen Capital, TA Ventures, EdgeEquity, and a handful of investors with backgrounds in sports, gaming, and consumer technology also participated–including BettingStartups Capital. The company plans to launch its first product, Momentum Markets, in summer 2026.
The core premise is a critique of how sportsbooks handle live games. An injury, scoring run, or momentum swing are in-game events fans care about, but only produce a single response from a sportsbook: a new price on a pre-set market. SpeedLabs’ engine reads live game flow using foundation models built specifically for sports, then creates and prices entirely new markets in response to what just happened on the field.
CEO Nick Meader tells BettingStartups its customers range from sportsbooks, prediction markets, exchanges, and crypto-native operators. “They all have an audience watching live and almost nothing live-native to give them,” he said.
Meader added that the sports betting industry is being “lapped” by newcomers like Kalshi and Polymarket, and SpeedLabs wants to fix that. "Prediction markets are minting new categories every week. Meanwhile sportsbooks are stuck on the same pre-set markets and bet types. The market for trading on what is happening right now is enormous, and sports—the most-watched, most-discussed, most-emotional category on the planet—is the one place where you still can't really do it."
The analog SpeedLabs points to is Polymarket's short-duration Bitcoin price markets, which the release says have generated over $4B in total trading volume—including $153M in a single day. The argument is that condensed, event-driven markets unlock demand that existing instruments don't capture. Sports, SpeedLabs contends, is the most obvious place to test whether that dynamic translates.
Greg Buonocore, CEO and Managing Partner at Parlay Capital Holdings, said “SpeedLabs is doing something we have not seen before: using AI to create the market itself, not just price markets that already exist." He added: “Every other company in this space is building incremental improvements to a category that has been structurally unchanged for decades."
The $6.5M will fund the team build-out ahead of launch. SpeedLabs is hiring across engineering, machine learning, trading, and C-level leadership—a signal that the company is still in early construction mode, even as the launch window approaches. The company is positioning Momentum Markets as infrastructure for sportsbooks and prediction markets, not a consumer-facing product of its own—a B2B wedge into a market it believes is structurally due for a reset.
“The bet here is that attention has moved to the live moment, and what's held the category back is product, not demand,” Meader tells us. “When you make that moment instantly actionable, this stops being a niche feature and becomes a default way fans engage with live sports.”
