As football fans across the country rep their team’s jersey at tailgates this NFL season, New York-based Mojo is introducing another way to get into the game. The company launched a stock market app where fans can cash in their confidence in their favorite players. Alongside its platform going live on Monday, Mojo announced an additional $25 million in funding.
Mojo’s CEO and co-founder Vinit Bharara describes the company’s platform as an intersection between Coinbase and DraftKings. Its solution enables fans to bet actual money on a player’s career prospects based on how they play on the field. Users can view players’ price graphs that reflect real-time changes, and the company provides investors with liquidity so they can trade in their stocks at any point. The app currently only features professional football players but plans to branch into various other sports categories in the future.
“Kenny Pickett, who’s a quarterback who just got drafted on the Steelers, … hasn’t played a snap in the NFL yet, but if he ends up becoming like Tom Brady, he could potentially be worth a lot,” Bart Stein, Mojo’s COO and co-founder, told Built In. “That’s really the basic premise — finding the next bright star who’s going to be the next player that has a great career.”
The app also has gamified features like multiplying an investment deposit, letting users gamble up to an additional 15x on their original bet. In the future, it plans to build more gamified features and other capabilities.
For nearly a century, U.S. sports gambling was only legal within the state of Nevada. Eventually, a 2018 Supreme Court ruling granted individual states the opportunity to decide their own terms for legalizing sports betting. Today, 30 states and Washington, D.C. have legalized it in some form.
Under its current license, Mojo users have to be in New Jersey to buy and trade stocks, but the company has market access agreements in nine more states where it’ll expand in the coming months. Part of its new capital will go toward obtaining that licensing. Users outside of New Jersey can still browse the app to gauge players’ stock market in the meantime.
Alongside Bharara and Stein, Mojo was conceived by former professional baseball player Alex Rodriguez and entrepreneur Marc Lore, the two co-owners of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Bharara and Lore have led several ventures together in the past, the first of which was called the Pit. This wagering solution that used trading cards as proxies for their respective athletes was Mojo’s predecessor. The Pit was founded alongside Lax Chandra, who is now Mojo’s vice president.
“[As] very passionate sports fan … we don’t necessarily know all the intricacies of these big companies and their earnings reports, but we can see and watch the players play on the field and we think we know how they’re going to do. It’s the debates that we always have,” Bharara told Built In. “If you are a sports fan, and you can sell some of these debates, I think it could be so much fun for the user.”
Founded on this idea in 2021, Mojo has secured over $100 million in funding to date. The company’s latest injection, which follows its March Series A round, is a combination of equity from Fin Capital and debt funding from TriplePoint Capital. Mojo’s list of investors also includes the National Football League Players Association.
Mojo is investing the bulk of its funding in furthering product development and fueling marketing. Its iOS app will also move onto Android systems at some point down the line.
Today, Mojo has about 90 employees working out of its 22nd Street headquarters. The company is currently hiring across several departments including data science and engineering, design and technology.
