Amar Rao spent more than 13 years building sports products at NumberFire, FanDuel, and Fanatics Sportsbook before deciding the industry's real bottleneck wasn't any single product—it was the data underneath all of them. His company, SportsStack, has quietly built a unified data layer for sports betting and prediction markets over the past year, and has now closed a small angel round that includes BettingStartups Capital, a stake disclosed publicly for the first time on the BettingStartups podcast.
The problem Rao kept running into across companies was fragmentation: every sports data provider ships its own IDs, formats, and edge cases, and there's no standard way to reconcile them. Matching a player's ID across a DFS product and a sportsbook—or across business units at a company like Fanatics—meant rebuilding the same mapping layer again and again, an expensive job that was never quite anyone's top budget priority.
SportsStack's Unified API replaces that with a single integration: universal IDs, a normalized schema, and the ability to turn on or swap a data provider without writing new code. The company now supports more than 30 providers across scores, stats, odds, and media content.
SportsStack's newer product, a settlement API launched this year, tackles a costlier version of the same problem: figuring out whether a bet actually won.
Data providers make mistakes—stat corrections, fat-fingered numbers, disputed calls—and sportsbooks then have to choose between clawing back a payout or eating the cost of paying out both sides. Rao says operators he's talked to are "losing north of like five, 10, $20 million a year on just regrades alone," a cost that hits harder for prediction markets, which can't claw back money at all. SportsStack cross-validates data across multiple sources and assigns a confidence score per market so operators can decide whether to hold or settle. Underdog and Novig are both live customers, using the company for mapping and settlement as they expand into prediction markets.
Rao self-funded SportsStack before this round, prioritizing the right strategic partners over speed of capital. The roadmap ahead is narrow by design—add more providers, tighten settlement accuracy—in pursuit of what Rao calls becoming "the default infrastructure layer" between data providers and everything built on top of them. SportsStack will be exhibiting in the Startup Zone at SBC Summit in Lisbon Sep. 29 - Oct. 1.
Listen to the full episode of the Business of Betting Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
