Matt Bresler was enjoying a family vacation when he discovered a giant shark tooth for sale in the historic Charleston City Market.
Then in high school, Bresler’s subsequent fascination with fossils led to a 7-year career in the international industry. Bresler brokered the sale of full skeletons to collectors around the world, stockpiled some cash, and used it to bootstrap Odditt.
Fast-forward to today, and Odditt delivers parlay construction and discovery infrastructure for sportsbooks, prediction markets, and daily fantasy sports platforms. Finding the shark tooth was great, of course, but discovering Elaine Milardo was something else altogether.
Milardo was the first data hire at DraftKings. where she grew the organization to more than 100 engineers, finishing her tenure as VP of engineering for the data platform. Milardo became Odditt’s co-founder and CTO in 2024.
With Bresler serving as CEO, & co-founder, Odditt has reached critical mass with its parlay solutions:
- 100,000 contextualized bets and parlays are delivered a day
- Data for more than 115 leagues in 45 countries
- Data pre-mapped to operator market IDs
Odditt recently signed a deal with Amelco, whose platform includes Flutter, Entain, Hard Rock, and Fanatics. Another recent deal with Optimove will see Odditt’s bets embedded in operators’ player messaging.
Odditt also launched Betflow, a consumer-facing product, in November of last year. The sports betting tool allows users to discover parlay bets and place them in a unique way.
Odditt CEO Matt Bresler Goes 1-on-1 With CasinoBeats
Earlier today, in an exclusive interview with CasinoBeats from his home base in Las Vegas, Bresler dished on fossils, Milardo, his vision for the industry’s future, and more. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CasinoBeats: How much did you make on your first fossil sale?
Matt Bresler: I remember selling the first one on eBay, and it just sold for like $10 or something. But it just blew my mind that I could make money on the internet doing something that I was really passionate about. I think It’s really interesting because if I were to do that business again now, I would take a much more technological approach to it.
CB: What did you learn from running a consumer-facing product like Betflow that you couldn’t learn by selling parlay solutions to sportsbooks?
Bresler: You learn people’s behavior down to what they are scrolling and lingering on. What are they clicking? How does the mix go, right? Our thesis is parlays are what everybody wants, but the numbers that come out of the sportsbook are largely suppressed in terms of the parlay volumes. If we make a cohesive-enough experience that’s frictionless, we think that they’ll place a lot more parlays, and we’ve been able to see that directly.
CB: So how would you characterize the growth of Betflow in its first year? How many users and how many bets have been explored so far?
Bresler: “Millions of bets have been explored. I think we’re coming up on like 2 million. It’s still a fairly small user base. Our focus has always been on the technology and products. We’re working on some partnerships with Betflow directly as well. We’re big into knowing what our strengths and weaknesses are rather than letting them stay limitations. So, we’re partnering with the right companies for that around bet flow and our direct-to-consumer stuff with more proficient marketing and user acquisition.
CB: Who do you consider Odditt’s biggest competitors to be today?
Bresler: I think our biggest competitor is the status quo, and that’s manual construction of this product, right? When you do it manually, you can only ever get a very thin covering, and you can only show the same thing to everyone. There’s a lot of sportsbooks out there that are sort of pantomiming what a good product experience with this stuff looks like.
The reality is that people are very distrustful if there’s only 20 (parlays) and everyone sees the same ones, and then you click into an individual event, and there’s none of them there for that event because somebody would have had to manually put them together to be there.
CB: Innovation gets tossed around a lot as a buzzword in the business world at large. What does it mean to truly innovate in this industry?
Bresler: In broad strokes, the companies that are truly innovating and truly asking what is next. That’s an area that we really focus on because you have the same functional bet types that have existed for 100 years, right? And the only advancement was that the algorithms got better, and that you could combine selections in the same game. We very strongly believe that’s not the final frontier in sports betting.
CB: Tell us about your working relationship with Elaine. I mean, she was like an OG in data back in the day at DraftKings, right?
Bresler: Yeah, absolutely. She was the first data hire there and ran their entire data team from its inception through post-IPO. Elaine and I work great together. We’re really perfect with counterbalances. I generally am the one that pushes the product forward, and she’s always the one who knows how to take an idea and actually make that something that can exist in reality.
That’s a dream come true for me because the first three years that I was doing this, I was kind of a solo show. I was never really able to get anything off the ground technologically. I’m sort of pushing on the front line, and she’s making sure that we can actually execute on all those things across technology and operations. So it’s a really, really invaluable partnership.
CB: Are there any new initiatives and/or product enhancements that you’re working on right now?
Bresler: Yeah, so a big one we’re focused on is personalization. We’ve partnered with Optimove on that front, and we’ll be launching personalized emails with embedded story-driven bets and parlays. We’re also working on rolling out personalization in our sportsbook widgets.
CB: What does that entail?
Bresler: You have the first phase when we have a lot higher quality content at scale that you can put anywhere, with prepackaged parlays on any surface that you want, and the end user right now can come in and filter that themselves. So, there’s a level of personalization and control there already. But with the next product rollout, when the user opens that, they’re already seeing stuff that’s tailored to them and most relevant to them.
CB: You’ve built this technology that can identify personal reasons for someone to make a bet. Is there a fine line to walk in making betting more accessible and making it more addictive?
Bresler: That’s a great question. We’re very big on transparency. We like to take the historical data and show it to you. We don’t like to calculate probabilities and predictions and sort of hide behind expected value. I don’t think this is something that, at the right scale and the right responsibility, is addictive. I think it’s something that augments your sports viewership experience.
I think in a lot of ways it’s really a more healthy experience, and it makes much more clear what the value you’re getting. Because if you enjoy the experience of choosing the bet itself, then it’s putting a lot less weight on like, ‘Oh man, I need to win this bet.’
CB: Has building a company around betting data changed the way you personally look at sports?
Bresler: When I started the company, it was all about these in-game models, algorithms, and how to exploit odds. As my education in this space continued, I realized that’s something that people within the industry and externally way over-index on is the winning. Obviously, you want to win. Nobody wants to lose money, but at the end of the day, most people aren’t going to win.
CB: What are some of Odditt’s newest offerings for leagues, and what others are you looking at to add in the future?
Bresler: We did a big push around the World Cup. We brought on about 10 or 15 tournaments, including the World Cup, and international play going forward. We will continue to expand our in-play and pre-match offerings within certain sports. I imagine we’re going to have tennis, rugby, and cricket. That will likely roll out sometime in the next 12 to 18 months.
CB: Last question: Where do you think the sports betting industry is headed in the next five years?
Bresler: I think what we’re really trying to pioneer, and where I see things going when looking at other forms of gambling and entertainment, including casino, is the actual mechanics by which you choose are going to have an explosion. That’s why we have these more gamified, entertaining, frictionless, and prepackaged parlays.
That’s why we’ve built out a first-of-its-kind emoji-to-parlay converter and more innovations in that realm. The question becomes less about, ‘What am I specifically going to bet on, and more about how am I going to get there?’ That’s what I think the industry isn’t thinking about enough and where it’s going.
The post Matt Bresler Went From Fossils to Parlays, Now Teams With Former DraftKings Data Chief to Lead Odditt appeared first on CasinoBeats.
Matt Bresler was enjoying a family vacation when he discovered a giant shark tooth for sale in the historic Charleston City Market. Then in high school, Bresler’s subsequent fascination with fossils led to a 7-year career in the international industry. Bresler brokered the sale of full skeletons to collectors around the world, stockpiled some cash,
The post Matt Bresler Went From Fossils to Parlays, Now Teams With Former DraftKings Data Chief to Lead Odditt appeared first on CasinoBeats.