A sports-data company that launched when there were no sports, and grew into the home of the NFL's most influential stat.
There is a certain kind of company that tells you exactly what it is in its name, and then spends years proving it meant it. FTN is one of those. The letters stand for "For The Numbers," which is either the most boring possible name for a sports media company or the most honest one, depending on how you feel about spreadsheets. FTN feels great about spreadsheets. That is essentially the entire business.
The founding story is the sort of detail that sounds invented but isn't. FTN launched in 2020, during the stretch of that year when the global sports calendar had been reduced to approximately one entry: Korean professional baseball, played in empty stadiums, broadcast to insomniac Americans at 5 a.m. Starting a sports-data company at the exact moment there were almost no sports to collect data on is a bit like opening a surf shop in the desert. The contrarian read is that it worked out, because the sports came back and FTN was already standing there with the infrastructure built.
What FTN actually does, once you get past the origin story, is take raw and often proprietary sports data - who was on the field, how each play was blocked, which defender was matched up on which receiver - and turn it into things ordinary people can use. Some of those people are setting a fantasy football lineup on a Sunday morning. Some are handicapping a Tuesday night NBA total. Some are professional daily-fantasy grinders who treat lineup optimization as a full-time job. And some are businesses that would rather license the data feed than build it themselves.
This is the quietly clever thing about FTN, and it's a pattern you see in a lot of good data companies: the consumer product and the enterprise product are the same product wearing different clothes. The numbers that power the friendly fantasy football rankings are the same numbers FTN licenses to B2B clients. One engine, several front doors. It is more capital-efficient to build the hard thing once and sell it four ways than to build four separate things.
The four front doors, roughly, are these. FTN Fantasy handles season-long fantasy - rankings, projections, articles, podcasts, the stuff you consume across a 17-week NFL grind. FTN Daily handles daily fantasy sports, which is a different and more mercenary game, full of lineup optimizers and ownership projections and the constant hunt for a player the rest of the field has overlooked. FTN Bets handles sports betting, with proprietary models - including an NFL model that leans on the company's advanced metrics. And FTN Data is the machine underneath, the advanced NFL and NBA data set that FTN built partly by acquiring a company called Armchair back in 2020 and then bolting on hundreds of new data points, including granular detail on which skill players were actually on the field for a given snap.
None of this would especially distinguish FTN from a dozen other fantasy sites, except for what happened in 2023, which is the year FTN stopped being a promising startup and started being a company with a moat.
"FTN was launched in 2020 during a global pandemic, when the only sport happening anywhere was Korean baseball."
To understand why 2023 mattered, you have to understand DVOA. Defense-adjusted Value Over Average is a football statistic invented in 2003 by a man named Aaron Schatz, who built it into a website called Football Outsiders that spent two decades quietly changing how serious people talked about the NFL. DVOA, and its cousins DYAR and Adjusted Line Yards, were the stats that let you argue a team was better or worse than its record - that a 9-7 team had actually played like a 12-4 team, or vice versa. If you have ever heard someone say a football team was "lucky," there is a decent chance the underlying math traces back to Schatz.
Then, in 2023, Football Outsiders closed. Its parent company hit financial trouble, the website went dark, and one of the most respected brands in football analytics simply stopped existing. This is the part of the story that's genuinely interesting from a business standpoint: a metric can be more durable than the company that houses it. DVOA didn't die when Football Outsiders did. It just needed a new home.
FTN gave it one. In August 2023, the company signed Schatz to a multi-year deal and named him Chief Analytics Officer, and with him came DVOA and the rest of his life's work. Suddenly FTN Bets subscribers were getting DVOA baked into the NFL betting model, and FTN's daily-fantasy customers were getting DVOA against specific defenders. FTN had gone from being a company with good tools to being the company that owned the vocabulary a whole generation of analysts had learned to speak in.
A month later, FTN acquired DFSForecast, folding another set of daily-fantasy projections into its stack, and launched a fantasy radio show on SiriusXM. Acquire, hire, broadcast, all in one autumn. It is the kind of concentrated activity that either signals a company overextending itself or one that has figured out precisely what it is and is buying everything adjacent to that thing. FTN's Q3 2023 numbers - $1.05 million in quarterly revenue, up 52 percent year over year - suggest the latter.
The metric outlived the company that made it. That is the whole lesson of FTN's 2023.
Rankings, projections, articles, podcasts and livestreams for fantasy football and beyond - the stuff you read across a full season.
Lineup optimizers, ownership projections and player-matchup data for DFS across NFL, MLB and NBA - built for the grind.
Proprietary betting models, including an NFL model that folds in DVOA and adjusted line yards for sharper angles.
Advanced NFL and NBA data - licensed B2B and powering every tool on the network. Built on the 2020 Armchair acquisition.
Aaron Schatz's full 32-team NFL preview: DVOA metrics, team projections and 300+ fantasy player forecasts before kickoff.
The company's analysts on SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio, launched in 2023 - numbers, out loud.
FTN's seed round closed in late 2023, and the arithmetic was flattering: a $3 million target, oversubscribed in about two months, with money from a group of private investors, a Techstars fund and 11 Tribes Ventures. The round was led by Perry Gershon - and this is where the story takes its more unusual turn. Gershon didn't just lead the round and take a board seat. He became the CEO. Founder Kevin Adams, who built FTN and is known to fantasy audiences by his on-air handle, sold a majority of his equity to Gershon and stepped into an advisory role.
There is a founder-ego version of this story where that reads as a demotion. The more generous, and probably more accurate, read is that Adams decided the company he'd started had outgrown the person best suited to run it day to day, and made room. Not every founder can do that. The ones who can tend to end up with more valuable companies and smaller stakes of them, which is usually the better trade.
Started FTN in 2020 and built it into a network. Known on air as @MagicSportsGuy; sold majority equity in the 2023 seed.
Led the oversubscribed $3M+ seed round and stepped in as CEO - the investor who wrote the check and then took the chair.
Creator of DVOA, DYAR and Adjusted Line Yards; founded Football Outsiders in 2003 and brought DVOA to FTN in 2023.
FTN launches during the pandemic - when the only live sport is Korean baseball - and acquires Armchair to build the FTN Data engine.
Signs DVOA creator Aaron Schatz to a multi-year deal as Chief Analytics Officer after Football Outsiders closes.
Acquires DFSForecast, folding its projections into FTN Daily's toolkit, and expands its SiriusXM presence.
Closes an oversubscribed $3M+ seed round; Perry Gershon named CEO as founder Kevin Adams moves to advisor.
Publishes the FTN Football Almanac 2026 - a full 32-team NFL preview with DVOA and 300+ player projections.
"FTN is your home for all things fantasy sports, betting, DFS, and game-changing stats."
The fantasy and betting analytics space is crowded and loud. FTN competes for the same subscribers as FantasyPros, RotoWire, RotoGrinders, 4for4, Pro Football Focus, Establish The Run and numberFire, among others. What separates FTN, to the extent anything does, is ownership of DVOA and a house style that leans hard into being the rigorous, numbers-first option in a category that often runs on confidence and volume.
That is a narrower audience than "everyone with a fantasy team." It is also a stickier one. People who want the spreadsheet don't churn when the takes get stale, because they were never there for the takes. For a company literally named For The Numbers, that's the audience worth having.
Compiled from public sources incl. FTN, Yogonet, Finsmes, Gaming America, News Direct, Crunchbase, PitchBook & Wikipedia. Figures are as reported and approximate.