Q&A: SportStack founder on comparisons with Football Index and seven-figure funding rounds

EGR first covered SportStack in February this year, detailing the two former Goldman Sachs traders who were aiming to launch a product that combined parts of daily fantasy with exchange betting and financial trading. More details on the product can be found here, but with SportStack on track for launch this football season, EGR sat down with founder and CEO Nick Smith to find out more about how the business is progressing.

EGR Intel: You’ve been compared, by EGR and others, to Football Index. Do you see them as a direct competitor?

Nick Smith (NS): In a word? No. At a very high level the notion of buying and selling shares in players appears similar between SportStack and Football Index but our product is very different. Firstly, SportStack is a peer to peer exchange (like Betfair) enabling users to buy, sell, go long, go short whereas Football Index is a fixed-odds provider where you can buy players from them and then simply sell them back [akin to cash-out] – more a gamification of a marketplace.

Secondly, the underlying value of players share prices on SportStack is solely determined by their performance. Demand and supply will freely drive the live market price at any point in time but ultimately the final settlement price is based on athletic performance.

We create a scoring table for every athlete in every sport that defines how much they will earn/lose for a variety of attributes and this is 100% transparent to everyone. Football Index uses a mixture of performance, media mentions and market fluctuations to value players – it is based on many different components outside of athletic performance.

Finally, SportStack has been built to cater to all athletes across all sports and our ambitions are to scale quickly beyond football and geographically beyond the UK. Launching with football in the UK is a natural starting point for us but our big vision is to create a global sports exchange to buy, sell and speculate on the performance of any professional athlete.

EGR Intel: What’s your timeline for launch now?

NS: SportStack will be launching as planned in October 2019. We will be inviting exclusive sets of users on our wait-list to participate in private matches and beta testing from the start of the season through to launch day. We have built everything ourselves using modern technology which enables us to scale incredibly quickly. It is easy to buy tech off the shelf but ultimately this creates huge complication and restriction down the line. Owning all our own technology gives us the flexibility to respond to the wants and needs of users and drive the exchange forward. We now have 3 senior developers working on the SportStack platform.

EGR Intel: Have investors shown an interest in the concept?

NS: Our pre-seed round at the start of the year was significantly oversubscribed and we will be raising our seed round toward the end of the summer. We already have significant interest from both individual and institutions to participate alongside several industry veterans and global VC’s. Exact details of the raise will be made public upon completion but we will be raising a 7-figure round.

EGR Intel: Do you see the platform being used more by recreational or professional betters/traders?

NS: We want the design and overall UI of SportStack to appeal to all customers from fantasy football fans all the way through to seasoned Betfair traders looking to actively trade players 24/7. Users can ‘Build their Sportfolio’ of players in a matter of clicks by tapping the players they wish to buy and sell and staking an amount or for the more advanced user they can go to individual player markets, check their stats, use the live charts and trade. We recognise that a lot of our early users will be from fantasy football fans and match day betting converts but our full expectation will be to attract more and more professional users as the markets and exchange matures.