A Timonium company is aiming to be a go-to source of information for anyone looking to participate in the rapidly growing world of sports betting. And it's using a new $1.4 million funding infusion to do it.
It all started with a suspect commercial on sports radio over a year ago. Christopher Adams said he and a friend were driving home from the beach and were struck by a radio commercial they heard, during which a man was making some bold claims about his sports betting ability and guaranteeing people money if they took his picks. Adams, who has an investment banking background, said the man's assertions about his betting prowess "seemed impossible," and he and his friend went searching for some kind of third-party oversight organization that could verify his performance or that of other sports bettors. They did not find anything.
That experience gave birth to the concept behind SharpRank, a startup platform that uses a proprietary algorithm to verify and rank professional sports gamblers, or sharps, based on their betting performance. The platform will also allow amateur bettors to participate and be ranked separately from the pros. Users can access the platform via a recently released app.
The startup has garnered about $1.4 million in capital backing from local investors Old Line Capital Partners and Maryland Technology Development Corp. (TEDCO), which it will use to fund additional product development, marketing and advertising and efforts to secure new partnerships.
Adams said SharpRank's goal is to become the sports betting equivalent of analysis and ranking sources like Morningstar Research for the investment space, or U.S. News & World Report for industries like health care and higher education. The SharpRank platform accounts for a bettor's success metrics and gives them a star rating, with five stars being the highest rating.
The global sports betting market grew to $203 billion in 2020, according to market research firm Statista. Another researcher, Technavio, has projected the market will grow by another $134 billion by 2024. In Maryland, the General Assembly passed a framework for sports betting in the state this past spring and the first licenses could be issued later this year.
"We're really trying to make a name for ourselves in this industry that's exploding," Adams said, adding that SharpRank built a tool that is not directly involved in betting, but is tangential to the industry because it believes: "When there's a gold rush, you don't go digging. You sell shovels."
The company's new funding is fueling a marketing and user growth push. SharpRank has six full-time employees and is looking to add to the team, Adams said. It is also gearing up to launch its team of more than 25 "campus captains," or students from various national colleges who have agreed to be marketing advocates for the platform and encourage more users in the company's target demographic to download the company's app.
The company has also already secured some notable partnership agreements, including with EdjSports, a predictive analytics company, and Maven, a global media conglomerate that operates Sports Illustrated. Adams explained that through these partnerships, and others in the pipeline, SharpRank hopes to grow visibility, through professionals and media representatives citing the startup's data or their own SharpRank ratings to validate picking abilities.
"In order for an industry to evolve and mature, there has to be a certain amount of oversight and transparency. And we want to fill that hole," Adams said.
