With March Madness weeks away, investors are placing their bets on Manhattan Beach startup Blok Sports.
Next week, the company will close a $1.3 million seed round to polish its blockchain-powered betting platform designed to help users place wagers without doling out their credit card information.
"We run a peer-to-peer sports betting exchange built on blockchain," said CEO and co-founder Mitchell Chun. "We're gamifying sports betting and making it more of a social experience. Our goal is to make this readily accessible for folks who aren't crypto-savvy or hardcore sports betters."
<p>The company launched its platform in early 2019 for some 800 subscribers of the Las Vegas betting site VSiN. Next month, it'll roll out a free March Madness platform with a new media partner. </p><p>Unlike traditional sports betting, Blok's model sets up bets between users without taking their payment information. Instead it uses a decentralized exchange service that records transactions and supports cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Litecoin.</p><p>"When it comes to online sportsbooks, there's been a preponderance of fraud," said Chun, a former Fox Interactive Media and Yahoo executive who sold 5:1, an ad platform, to Yahoo in 2011 for about $28 million. He's more than doubled his team within the past two weeks, taking on six new developers.</p><p>On Blok, users can "make wagers directly with other people," he said "without the involvement of a middleman." </p><p>The company makes money by taking a small fee from each peer-to-peer wager. Chun plans on inking sponsorships to help support the free March Madness platform. </p><p>Chun declined to disclose the media and sports investors who participated in the round, which was oversubscribed by $300,000. </p>
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