Billy Bets, the AI-powered sports-betting startup, closed a $1 million pre-seed round with Coinbase Ventures, and participation from Virtuals Ventures, Contango Digital, CMS Holdings, and a roster of athlete and crypto-native angels. The capital accelerates the public launch of the Billy Terminal, personalized autonomous betting agents, and expanded $BILLY token utility.
Sports wagering generates an estimated $250 billion in annual handle, yet fewer than 1% of bets are executed by AI agents on prediction markets.
“That inefficiency is our wedge. AI agents have already changed investing; now they’re coming for sportsbooks. Billy Bets will turn that small sliver into the default way fans bet,” said Joe O’Rourke, Co-founder & CEO.
Built on Base (Coinbase’s Layer 2), Billy supports bet discovery across prediction markets, including Kalshi and Polymarket, by highlighting edges, routes wagers to the best available price, and enables customized automated strategies. Billy’s natural-language terminal turns “Show me plus-EV NFL props tonight” into live odds, automated execution and real-time, traceable ROI tracking. Billy has routed over $1 million in betting volume, growing at 23% per week, since the launch of the Billy Terminal in June.
“Fundamentally, we believe all sports bettors will eventually rely on AI to improve their chances, particularly so with the advent of prediction markets, and we aim to be the best supplier of that agentic technology,” said Jared Augustine, Co-founder & Executive Chairman.
