Gambly and Unabated have merged to form Gambly Ventures, Inc., combining Gambly’s AI-powered betslip platform with Unabated’s sports betting data and analytics tools.
The deal pairs two companies that were already deeply intertwined. Unabated has held equity in Gambly since the beginning, and the two teams have shared resources for more than two years. According to Cal Spears, who co-founded Gambly with Jonathan Bales and will serve as CEO of the combined entity, the merger became the obvious next step.
“It was at G2E, about two-and-a-half years ago now, that we were searching for a good odds ingestion provider and deep link provider, a data services company to partner with us and help us start up Gambly,” Spears told InGame. “We looked at a few others, and Unabated was impressive.”
Spears and Bales are veterans of the daily fantasy sports industry through their work with RotoGrinders and FantasyLabs. Spears is also a co-founder of Third Planet Media, which owns InGame, though Third Planet and Gambly Ventures are separate companies.
Unabated was co-founded by Jack Andrews, Matt Snyder, Peter Jennings, Kevin Cassata, Rufus Peabody, and Dan Fabrizio. It has built a reputation among sharp bettors for its odds comparison tools, simulators, calculators, and market analytics. Snyder will serve as CTO of Gambly Ventures, with Bales as chief strategy officer.
Surprise, surprise
The formal merger, Spears said, wasn’t part of the original plan.
“I think at one point their lawyer just suggested that we merge because we were doing so many intertwined deals,” Spears said. “At that point we started taking it seriously.”
Both platforms will continue to operate under their own brands. Gambly will remain focused on the mainstream bettor, using natural language prompts and deep-link integrations to move users from the idea of a bet to a placed wager. Unabated will continue serving what Spears called “the top 1 percent of bettors.” The shared investment sits in the middle: data ingestion, data mapping, latency, and data science.
Gambly’s numbers tell the story of its reach. Over 200,000 users have added Gambly’s phone number to their contacts. More than 2,700 Discord servers use the service. The platform delivered nearly 15 million betslips to sportsbook operators during this past NFL season alone.
“Wherever you are, we want Gambly to be there,” Spears said. “You can just say, ‘Hey Siri, ask Gamblybot to give me the best bet for the NCAA tournament,’ and we’ll text you the best slip.”
The company is also expanding beyond sports. Spears said Gambly plans to generate betslips for prediction markets, turning things like weather tweets into deep-linked market slips.
“After a few challenging years for the affiliate industry, the opportunity ahead is being underestimated,” Spears said. “Prediction markets are raising billions and legacy operators are preparing to enter more than 20 new states. With Gambly’s AI tools and Unabated’s data infrastructure, we’re positioned to capture that growth.”
Andrews said the merger gives Unabated the engineering resources to build faster without losing its identity.
“Unabated gives aspiring bettors the tools and resources to make sharper bets,” Andrews said in a release announcing the deal. “This merger of engineering talent and product vision allows us to build more efficiently and enables bettors on both platforms to make better wagers. It’s a win/win/win.”
Bales echoed the point.
“Our mission is simple: move people from the idea of a bet to a placed wager as frictionlessly as possible,” Bales said. “By combining Unabated’s tools with Gambly’s technology, we can serve the full spectrum of the betting market.”
Spears said users won’t see changes right away, but the pace of product development should accelerate.
“The biggest thing is we’re rowing in the same direction,” he said. “Combining and investing in data and data ingestion, data mapping, latency, data science. These are things that I think we were going to do before, but they would just have been slower and maybe more disjointed. Now that’s not the case.”
