Chicago online ticket marketplace Vivid Seats has acquired a fantasy sports app as it expands its business beyond ticket sales.
Vivid Seats (NASDAQ: SEAT) said Monday it's buying Betcha Sports, a daily fantasy sports startup that combines gambling with social media features, for $25 million in Vivid Seats' stock. The deal could be worth up to an additional $40 million if Betcha hits certain performance metrics.
Founded in 2018, New York-based Betcha lets fans gamble on player props on games, like whether a basketball player will score over or under a certain number of points, while also incorporating tools to chat with friends, earn rewards and climb the app's leaderboards.
Betcha describes itself as if "sports betting, fantasy, Twitter and e-sports had a baby." The startup raised $4 million in funding in July. Its investors include Sinai Ventures and Muse Capital.
Betcha is the second acquisition for Vivid Seats since Stan Chia took over as CEO in 2019, and the first since the company went public in October in a nearly $2 billion SPAC deal. Vivid Seats, founded in 2001, paid almost $60 million to acquire ticketing company Fanxchange in 2019.
The Betcha deal gives Vivid Seats a new revenue stream in the popular sports gambling space, which Chia called a "naturally adjacent area" to Vivid Seats' primary ticket business.
Correction: Story has been updated to accurately reflect the deal size. The acquisition is worth up to $65 million, not $40 million.
