Vaidhy Murti

A poll is a Trojan horse

Tap "vote" for your favorite halftime moment and you think you just had an opinion. Vaidhy Murti knows you just handed over a verified identity, a phone number, and a small confession about what makes you cheer. That exchange - a second of fun for a sliver of data - is the whole business of WIT, the New York company he has been building since 2018.

WIT runs the contests, polls, instant-win games, photo walls, and sweepstakes you see on the jumbotron and the team app. Sponsors pay for them. Fans play them. Teams across the NFL, NHL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS, and NCAA - nearly a hundred venues, leagues, and clubs - use them to learn who is actually in the building and how to reach them on a Tuesday in July when nobody is playing. The off-season is the hard part, and the off-season is where WIT earns its keep.

The mechanics are deceptively plain. A brand sponsors a vote-to-win or a "guess the score" arcade game. The team drops it into its app or onto the big screen. Thousands of fans play because playing is fun and free, and in the playing they leave behind something the team rarely had before: a name attached to a preference, an email that opted in, a face on a photo wall. Three outcomes from one tap - authentic user-generated content, first-party data the franchise owns outright, and a sponsor activation that can actually be measured. Murti likes to describe WIT as enterprise software for fan engagement, which is a sober label for a product that mostly looks like a game.

The dorm-room habit

Murti grew up in New Jersey and went to Princeton for computer science, class of 2015. The textbook version of a CS major builds a side project. He built a company. Friendsy started in 2012 as a verified, .edu-only social app - chat anonymously, reveal yourself when the feeling is mutual. The press called it "Tinder for college," which undersold the part Murti cared about: making it safe to say hello.

It worked faster than a side project should. A thousand users in the first week at Princeton. Ten thousand by the end of the year. It detonated at Dartmouth. In 2015 he closed $500,000 from Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Slow Ventures, which made him, at 21, the youngest founder Lerer Hippeau had backed. By the time the team wound Friendsy down in 2017, it had brokered roughly three million matches among 300,000 students. One of them reportedly met his future wife there.

Then came the part the highlight reel skips. The funding arrived and the users left. Growth got harder, not easier. Murti and his co-founders had to claw monthly actives back from a sag - from a few thousand in August to 60,000 the following February - by stripping the product back to the thing people actually loved. It was an early, expensive lesson in a principle he repeats now without flinching.

It also taught him to read a curve honestly. Friendsy's differentiator was never the swipe - it was the closed campus network, the .edu verification that let a freshman trust that the person on the other end was a real classmate and not a bot in another city. When the company drifted from that promise, the numbers told on it. When it returned, they recovered. That instinct - protect the trust, ship the thing people use, ignore the thing that merely impresses - is the muscle he carried into his next company.

The four-year overnight success

WIT was supposed to be the redemption arc. It was, eventually - but it took four years and three full pivots before the company turned profitable in 2022, and Murti himself did not personally break even until the end of 2023. The same year, WIT landed on a Best Employer in Sports list. The pattern of his career is not the genius idea that lands clean. It is the founder who keeps re-cutting the idea until one of the versions survives contact with the market.

What survived is a machine for first-party data dressed up as fun. Every vote-to-win, every fan photo wall at an NBA arena, every Pride-month activation and NHL partner promotion does three jobs at once: it sources authentic fan content, it captures data a team actually owns, and it gives a sponsor something to point at. In 2025 he wrapped a layer of intelligence around all of it and shipped Fan AI, turning the pile of poll answers into insights teams can sell against.

Timing helped. The whole sports-marketing world has spent the last few years scrambling toward first-party data as third-party cookies crumble and privacy rules tighten. A franchise that knows only its season-ticket holders is flying half-blind on the casual fan who watches from a couch, follows a single player, and never buys a ticket. WIT's games are a way to meet that fan, get a knowing yes, and build a profile that belongs to the team rather than to a platform renting it back. Murti has talked about exactly this on the podcast circuit - extending reach beyond the in-stadium crowd, capturing fans who care more about a player than a club, and stitching enriched data into real fan profiles.

The boss who learned to let go

Murti codes. That was the whole job once - he was the engineer, the product, the support desk. Growing WIT meant giving that up, which he admits did not come naturally.

So he built a culture instead of a bottleneck. At WIT, teammates pitch the ideas. He spends his time on the partners - calling them, running annual recaps, sending the newsletters, asking the unglamorous question of what is broken and fixing it. For someone who started in a dorm optimizing for human connection, the through-line is almost too neat: he is still in the business of getting people to show up, raise a hand, and feel seen.

The roster around him reflects that. WIT carries a real bench - a chief technology officer, senior engineers, and marketing and revenue leads who own their lanes - rather than a founder doing impressions of six jobs. Murti's own contribution has shifted from writing the code to keeping the company pointed at the customer. When Sports Business Journal asked him to tell WIT's story in 2025, he reduced it to three words: resilience, innovation, and the team that made it possible. Coming from a founder who needed four years and three pivots to see daylight, "resilience" reads less like a slogan and more like a job description.

The Princeton version of Murti coached middle-school basketball, played cricket, and floated through cultural clubs between problem sets. The current version runs a company that asks tens of thousands of sports fans a question and keeps every answer. Same instinct, bigger stadium. He won Princeton's Tiger Entrepreneur Award in 2018 - the very year he walked away from a finished story and started an unfinished one.

What he is chasing

The aspiration is bigger than any single contest. Murti wants to close the distance between a team, the Fortune 1000 brands that sponsor it, and the fans who would run through a wall for both - turning fleeting attention into content, data, and revenue that outlasts the final whistle. Eight years in, the work reads less like a sports-tech play and more like the same question he asked from a Princeton dorm: how do you get strangers to actually connect, on purpose, without the risk.