Deven Hurt

Open PredictionStrike and a basketball player looks like a stock. A name, a price, a line that twitches green or red. Buy a guard before the playoffs, watch the number climb when he drops 40, sell into the noise. The rookie nobody wanted last October is the asset everybody chases in March. Deven Hurt built the floor where that trade happens.

He runs it from New York as co-founder and CEO. The premise is almost rude in its simplicity: fans already argue about who is undervalued and who is about to crater, so give them a market and let the arguing settle in dollars. Prices on the platform move on two forces - supply and demand, and a player's performance measured against expectations. Beat the projection, the stock rises. Lay an egg against an easy line, it sinks.

The interesting part is who built it. Hurt did not arrive from a trading desk or a fantasy-sports incubator. He came out of a Harvard biomedical engineering lab, by way of cybersecurity work that touched Nike and the NBA. He learned how the machinery of professional sports was wired from the inside, then decided the most interesting market in sports was the one that did not exist yet.

The platform covers NBA and NFL players, and the pricing leans on real projections rather than vibes. Third-party ranking tools forecast what a player should do in a given game, statistic by statistic. A market then forms around that forecast. Outperform the expectation and the share appreciates; come in under it and holders feel the drop. It is fantasy sports stripped of the season-long bookkeeping and handed the one mechanic fans actually crave - the live tick of a price that means something the moment the ball is in the air.

The idea that would not leave

He started the company in 2018 with his best friend, Brad Chabra. Not a co-founder scavenged from a networking mixer - the friend. The two of them looked at the way fans talk about players, the constant informal pricing of talent, and landed on a single conviction. Hurt has described the moment plainly: "That's it, that's the thing we have to build." There is no founding myth dressed up here. There was a thing fans already did in their heads, and a market that could hold it.

Most founders would have stopped there and gone all in. Hurt did something stranger. He enrolled at Harvard Law School.

Two things, no room for a third

Admitted through Harvard's Junior Deferral Program, he spent his first year of the JD running a venture-backed startup in the margins. Asked what that was like, he did not reach for inspiration. He reached for arithmetic: "Pretty much, I only had time to do school and run the company." No hobbies survived the math. He leaned on the flexibility of the program's later years to push nearly every non-class hour into the platform, and when people asked how it felt, his answer stayed honest - "In terms of the experience while being a student, it is challenging."

The bet paid in increments and then in lumps. Early on, the company pulled more than a million dollars from institutional investors. Then, around his graduation, the big one: a $10 million Series A led by Bullpen Capital, with Correlation Ventures, Elevate Capital, Gaingels, MaC Venture Capital, HighSage Ventures and Sixty8 Capital filling out the round. The raise put the company at a reported valuation near $32 million.

That cap table is its own tell. Bullpen Capital made its name backing companies that look too weird for the consensus and too early for the late-stage crowd. MaC Venture Capital and Sixty8 Capital bring an eye for founders the rest of the market keeps overlooking. The money did not arrive because a sports-trading app was fashionable. It arrived because a founder kept a niche product alive long enough to show the numbers moving in the right direction, then asked for fuel at exactly the moment the engine had started to turn over on its own.

The unglamorous degree that mattered

It is tempting to file the law degree under trophy. It is not. PredictionStrike lives in the most contested patch of ground in consumer tech - the seam between a game of skill and a wager, between a market and a sportsbook. Every player-pricing platform that has ever drawn a crowd has also drawn regulators. A founder who can read a statute, weigh a compliance posture, and understand exactly where the line sits is not collecting credentials. He is building a moat out of the one thing competitors tend to treat as an afterthought until it sinks them. Hurt spent three years learning the rules of the table he chose to sit at.

Proof, not promises

Trading platforms are easy to launch and hard to keep alive. The graveyard is full of clever exchanges that no one used twice. PredictionStrike crossed the line that matters: more than 200,000 users and over $100 million in completed transactions, and in November 2024, profitability on a per-user basis. That last number is the quiet one. It means each new trader, on average, pays for themselves - the part that separates a real business from a well-funded experiment.

Hurt's ambition is not a bigger app. It is a reflex. He wants the share price to become the thing a fan checks on instinct the moment a trade hits the wire or a player goes off, the same way an investor glances at a ticker after earnings. Make the number automatic, and the platform stops being a product and starts being plumbing. The clearest version of his thesis fits in nine words: what PredictionStrike will be to sports is what the stock market is. Said out loud it sounds like overreach. Said with 200,000 users and a profitable unit economic behind it, it sounds like a roadmap.

He has been on a small circuit of sports and business podcasts making the same patient case - that the way fans already talk about undervalued and overvalued players is a price waiting for an exchange. He is not loud about it. The pitch is the product, and the product is a number that moves. There is something fitting about a founder who measures everything choosing to build a company whose entire interface is a measurement.

For now he keeps building it the way he built everything else - by treating an obvious human behavior as a market waiting to be priced, and refusing to be the third thing on a schedule that only had room for two.

Why this, and why now

Strip the platform down and what is left is a wager on a cultural shift. Two trends have been pulling at each other for a decade. Retail trading went from a hobby to a reflex, with millions of people who check a portfolio the way an earlier generation checked a box score. And sports fandom went from passive to participatory, with fantasy leagues, prediction games, and second-screen everything. PredictionStrike sits exactly on the fault line where those two habits meet. Hurt did not invent the appetite. He noticed it was unserved.

The hard part was never the concept; the concept explains itself in a sentence. The hard part is the unglamorous middle - the matching engine that has to clear trades fairly, the projection feeds that have to stay honest, the compliance posture that has to survive contact with a regulator, the unit economics that have to work when the marketing spend stops. Those are the parts that do not make the pitch deck and decide whether a company lives. Reaching per-user profitability in late 2024 was Hurt's way of saying the middle holds.

He is not promising to reinvent how people watch sports. He is betting they have already changed, and that someone needs to build the exchange the new fan keeps reaching for. So far the tape agrees with him.

“That's it, that's the thing we have to build.”

“Pretty much, I only had time to do school and run the company.”

“In terms of the experience while being a student, it is challenging.”