SpeedLabs raises $6.5M to create new sports markets from in-game moments

The New York startup's Momentum Markets create new in-game markets from live game events, instead of repricing old ones.

Waterhouse VC: Hearts and Goliath

This week: Meet the five startups competing for $100K at First Pitch

Also: Benjie Cherniak lays out what founders should know before they pitch in an AMA, and Betr acquires an introducing broker to fast track a path to prediction markets later this year.

Meet the five startups pitching at SBC Summit Americas 2026

Five finalists. Three minutes each. One stage in Fort Lauderdale, FL on June 11—here's who they are and what they're building.

What a gaming industry veteran wants founders to know before they pitch

Benjie Cherniak, who helped see Don Best Sports through to acquisition, now advises early-stage companies, and shared some thoughts during an AMA.

This week: Hedge funds are coming for sports betting, prediction market arbitrage

Also: SBC reveals the lineup of startups heading to First Pitch next month, and how Soap Payments plans to clean up a messy payment landscape for operators.

Payments are messy for operators, and Soap Payments wants to clean it up

Filip Michalsky and his co-founders are building the payments layer that real-money gaming operators have always needed but had to cobble together themselves.

This week: No-code platforms are gaining traction in real-money gaming sector

Also: Fast Draft and FantasySpin merge to win over the 60M fantasy players sportsbooks left behind, and ChatBet expands WhatsApp-based betting to LATAM.

Fast Draft, FantasySpin merger wants to champion fantasy as operators shift to sports betting and prediction markets

Fast Draft founder Matt Kelley says the combined entity plans to “make fantasy great again” by staying focused on the core audience and not deviating to adjacent product segments.

This week: XO Market raises $6M to build the “YouTube of prediction markets”

Also: Elastic’s $2M raise to develop AI agents for prediction markets, and how Hydrastack converts land-based slot games into online-ready versions at a fraction of the time and cost.

Hydrastack is building the fastest way to bring land-based casino games online

The Hydrastack co-founders are building an AI-powered platform that converts land-based casino games to online in weeks—solving a supply chain problem that's frustrated manufacturers, operators, and players for years.

This week: Lucra scores $20M to help brands build P2P experiences

Also: eyeDP closed a seed round to scale document fraud detection, and GridGorilla plans to reinvent the Super Bowl squares format into something digital, and bigger.