Sports data technology startup sets sights on betting as an asset class
Milan, 20 November: Sports-betting and data technology start-up Mercurius is delighted to announce it has achieved its target of raising €500,000 in second- round funding from industry investors.
The Milan-based company has now raised a total of €800,000 from two funding rounds and will use the money raised to enhance and develop its sports-trading product and further expand the team.
Mercurius was founded in 2017 by Fabrizio Machella, the CEO, Lorenzo Malanga who performs the role of Head of Data Science and Mario Ciardulli who is the company’s Chief Marketing Officer.
Machella said he was excited by the level of interest the business generated in its latest funding round.
“We have a very thrilling idea for the future of sports trading and we are very pleased that our investors agree that we are on the right path,” he said.
“They are backing our vision of building a product that will exploit the increasing similarities between the worlds of gambling on sports and trading financial instruments. Our whole proposition is based on the idea that sports betting will become ever more trading- and exchange-based thanks to the evolution of data analysis and predictive technology.”
Sports-betting into finance
The money from the second round of funding will help develop Mercurius’ idea of moving sports-betting towards being regarded as a new type of alternative asset class.
Specifically, a pilot will be set up with investment firm Digital Value which will create a financial vehicle for sophisticated investors to take advantage of Mercurius’ AI- based data technology.
“We plan to increase the number of competitions we can analyse and the types of bets we can effectively cover alongside being able to model workable hedging strategies,” added Machella.
“We want to create the tech stack that can be used by asset managers for use in what we see as a coming and importantly uncorrelated asset class of the future.”
First-round funding
In its first round of funding in 2018, Mercurius was backed by an Italian venture capitalist, Wylab, the first Italian sports-tech incubator which facilitated a partnership with football analytics company Wyscout, as well as business angels Andrea Anderlini, Luca Russo and Luigi Tempio. All the previous investors have invested in the second round of funding alongside business angels Piero Minotti, Roberto Rossi, Stan Ivanov and Mattia Pasquali.
“We love what Fabrizio and his team are trying to achieve,” said Federico Smanio, Wylab CEO. “Sports data and analytics is really coming of age and the way that Mercurius is leveraging that in the field of sports-betting is awesome. We are really very happy to be accompanying them on this journey.”
Early-stage investor Anton Kaszubowski from Greenlaw added that he was very impressed with what he had seen of the technology and how it can potentially revolutionise ideas around sports-betting and investment.
“This isn’t just a sports-betting product,” he said. “What Mercurius has done is produce a product that takes advantage of developments in trading, exchange betting and data analysis and wielded it into a platform that could really shake things up in the twin area of gambling and investing.”
Mattia Pasquali from Digital Value said the company was very excited about its joint venture and was looking forward to enabling uncorrelated value creation for its clients. “Sports betting and finance are getting closer due to the power of data
analytics; we are very well positioned with this partnership in place to benefit from the increasing demand for alternative products due to the high maturity of the current economic cycle,” he said.
About us
Mercurius BI is a tech start-up, operating in Italy and in the UK, aimed at transforming sports betting into a new financial investment category. Mercurius was founded in 2017 by Fabrizio Machella (CEO), Lorenzo Malanga (Head of Data Science) and Mario Ciardulli (CMO), and subsequently backed by an Italian VC, by the sports tech incubator Wylab and by a group of business angels in 2018. Since its inception, Mercurius has been improving its proprietary AI algorithms to crunch massive amounts of detailed sports data in order to create profitable value betting strategies. Today Mercurius’s technology is available to professional traders and sophisticated investors through its app for the Betfair Exchange (https://trader.mercurius.io). Mercurius’s innovative quantitative approach to sports trading is the foundation for the Company’s vision of establishing sports betting as a viable alternative investment asset class. The Company is now eager to start working with investment firms to create tailored financial products based on sports trading that are targeted at qualified investors.
