Sports VCs back Mercurius Milan as betting’s hottest prospect

Milan-based start-up Mercurius, sports betting data science enterprise confirms that it has raised €500,000 completing its second round of venture capital funding.

Mercurius is founded by the engineering trio of Fabrizio Machella (CEO), Lorenzo Malanga (Data Science Chief) and Mario Ciardulli (CMO) seeking to develop new algorithms and components treating sports betting as a ‘new alternative asset class’ open to diverse investors.

Completing its latest funding round, Mercurius details that it will use proceeds to continue the development of its sports trading modules.

“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,” comments CEO Fabrizio 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.”

Fulfilling its enterprise mandate, to date the Milan prospect has raised €800,000 in funding backed by Wylab, the VC vehicle of Italian football intelligence firm Wyscout and further angel investors.

Pleasing its early backers, Mercurius has proven its development capacity, launching its ‘Tradr – one touch trading tool’ on Betfair’s ‘App Directory’, a tough listing for Engineering teams.

“We love what Fabrizio and his team are trying to achieve,” said Federico Smanio, Wylab Chief Executive.

“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.”

Backing its Mercurius investment, second round VC Digital Value will create a pilot scheme introducing further investors to Mercurius’ data science and AI-based trading components.

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,” Pasquali adds.