Fantasy Life
Building technology that gives the DFS, fantasy, and betting communities an outsized advantage.
Website: https://www.fantasylife.com
Cover Block
PUBLIC
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Fantasy Life |
| Tagline | Building technology that gives the DFS, fantasy, and betting communities an outsized advantage. |
| Headquarters | New York, United States |
| Founded | 2020 |
| Stage | Seed |
| Business Model | B2C |
| Industry | Media / Entertainment |
| Technology | Software (Non-AI) |
| Geography | North America |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Solo Founder (Matthew Berry) |
| Funding Label | Seed |
| Total Disclosed | ~$7,000,000 |
Links
PUBLIC
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fantasy-life-media
- LinkedIn (alt): https://www.linkedin.com/company/fantasylifeapp
- Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fantasy-life
- PitchBook: https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/519854-95
Executive Summary
PUBLIC
Fantasy Life is a New York based fantasy sports media and technology company founded in 2020 by NBC Sports analyst Matthew Berry. It merits investor attention because it is attempting to convert one of the most recognizable personal brands in fantasy football into an owned software platform at the moment its category is consolidating around tech-first operators [Business Insider, Jul 2025] [Sports Business Journal, Jul 2025]. The company began as a free morning football newsletter and mobile app delivering injury tracking, news alerts, and game-day reports, and it has since expanded into community tools and a content engine targeting DFS, season-long fantasy, and sports betting audiences [Crunchbase]. In July 2025, Fantasy Life closed a $7 million seed round led by LRMR Ventures (LeBron James and Maverick Carter's family office) and SC Holdings, alongside an unusually deep bench of strategic angels including David Blitzer, Jeff Shell, Roger Ehrenberg, John Legend, Chad Hurley, and Larry Fitzgerald [Crunchbase, Jul 2025]. Proceeds are funding the launch of Fantasy HQ, a personalized hub for player insights and league tools, and the buildout of Guillotine Leagues, a knockout-format league product the company acquired and where reported average session time is 22 minutes [Business Insider, Jul 2025] [CasinoBeats, Jul 2025]. The business model is B2C, designed to convert free content readers into users of premium tools and gameplay features, with a planned full redesign across web, iOS, and Android and a Fantasy Life+ tier [Business Insider, Jul 2025]. Berry is a solo founder, but reported senior hires include Matthew Swing and Dan Kaufman on the operating side [LinkedIn]. Over the next 12 to 18 months, the items worth watching are the conversion rate from newsletter audience to Fantasy HQ active users, the retention curve on Guillotine Leagues during the 2025 NFL season, and whether the company can layer paid game mechanics without crossing into regulated DFS or sportsbook territory.
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Crunchbase, Business Insider, and Sports Business Journal.
Taxonomy Snapshot
| Axis | Value |
|---|---|
| Stage | Seed |
| Business Model | B2C |
| Industry / Vertical | Media / Entertainment, Fantasy Sports |
| Technology Type | Software (Non-AI) |
| Geography | North America |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Solo Founder |
| Funding | ~$7M disclosed seed |
Company Overview
PUBLIC
Fantasy Life was founded in 2020 by Matthew Berry, the longtime ESPN and current NBC Sports fantasy analyst, and is headquartered in New York [PitchBook] [ZoomInfo]. The company started as a free daily football email and a companion mobile app, with the explicit positioning of giving everyday fantasy and DFS players the kind of edge that historically required a paid subscription stack across multiple sites [Crunchbase]. The product surface initially included breaking news alerts, injury tracking, and game-day reports delivered through the app and inbox [LinkedIn].
The defining milestone to date is the July 2025 seed round of $7 million, led by LRMR Ventures and SC Holdings, announced alongside the unveiling of Fantasy HQ and the company's acquisition of Guillotine Leagues, a knockout-style fantasy format with a small but engaged user base [Crunchbase, Jul 2025] [Sports Business Journal, Jul 2025]. The round formalizes the company's transition from a content brand into what the company itself frames as a technology and gaming platform [World Casino Directory]. Berry remains the public face and creative anchor, while reported senior staff include Matthew Swing and Dan Kaufman [LinkedIn].
Fantasy Life operates in the same broader ecosystem as Betsperts Media and Technology Group, which lists a Fantasy Life App among its brands in a separate Crunchbase profile, a relationship readers should clarify directly with the company given that the operating entity for the Berry-led business is distinct [Crunchbase].
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Crunchbase, PitchBook, and Sports Business Journal.
Product and Technology
MIXED
The product portfolio spans three layers: a free content layer (the daily football newsletter and the mobile app with news alerts and injury tracking) [LinkedIn], a community and tools layer being repackaged under the new Fantasy HQ brand as a personalized hub for player insights, real-time data, and league management tools [CasinoBeats, Jul 2025], and a gameplay layer anchored by Guillotine Leagues, the knockout-format league product the company acquired in 2025 [Fantasy Life, Jul 2025]. According to the pitch deck reviewed by Business Insider, the company plans a full redesign across web, iOS, and Android and the introduction of a paid Fantasy Life+ tier carrying premium tools and additional content [Business Insider, Jul 2025].
Guillotine Leagues is the most differentiated piece of the stack. Each week the lowest-scoring team is eliminated and its roster returns to the player pool, which the company says drives an average session time of 22 minutes on the platform [Business Insider, Jul 2025]. That session figure, if it holds at scale, sits well above typical season-long fantasy engagement and is the central data point in the investment narrative around the acquisition.
On infrastructure, ZoomInfo lists the marketing and operational stack as including Cloudflare for site optimization, DoubleClick and Bing Ads on the acquisition side, and Zendesk for customer support (inferred from third-party tech graph data) [Crunchbase]. The company has not publicly described its underlying app architecture or data pipeline, and there are no open engineering roles surfaced from public ATS hosts to triangulate the stack further.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Product features confirmed by Business Insider and CasinoBeats; tech stack inferred from a single third-party data provider.
Market Research and Opportunity
PUBLIC
Fantasy sports and adjacent betting are entering a phase where audience habits, content distribution, and regulated gameplay are converging into single-app experiences, and that convergence is what makes a content-first brand attempting a software pivot timely.
The US fantasy sports and sports betting markets have grown rapidly since the 2018 Supreme Court decision in Murphy v. NCAA opened the door to state-level sports betting legalization. While Fantasy Life has not published a third-party TAM in any cited document, the operating context can be sketched from public reporting: DFS-style and pick'em products from Underdog Fantasy and similar operators have scaled into significant nine-figure revenue businesses, and reporters covering the category in 2025 have framed the consumer surface as a battle between content brands, league operators, and sportsbooks for the same fan attention [Betting Startups News, Jul 2025] [Sports Business Journal, Jul 2025].
Demand drivers cited in coverage of the round are straightforward. Fantasy participation in the US remains anchored by the NFL season, where Berry has the strongest brand recognition; the audience increasingly expects mobile-first tools (injury feeds, start/sit calls, projections) bundled with the content they already consume; and the rise of pick'em and short-form game formats has demonstrated that fantasy players will engage daily, not just weekly, when product mechanics encourage it [Business Insider, Jul 2025]. Guillotine Leagues' 22 minute reported session time is the company's primary evidence point for that thesis [Business Insider, Jul 2025].
The regulatory backdrop is the most important macro variable. Pick'em DFS products from competitors have faced state-by-state challenges over whether their formats constitute illegal sports betting, and any move by Fantasy Life into paid contest mechanics will sit inside that same regulatory lens. The company's current positioning, free content plus season-long league tools plus a planned premium subscription, is largely outside that perimeter, which both reduces near-term legal risk and caps near-term revenue ceiling versus DFS peers.
| Reference Point | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Guillotine Leagues avg. session time | 22 minutes | [Business Insider, Jul 2025] |
| Fantasy Life seed round | $7M | [Crunchbase, Jul 2025] |
| Founding year | 2020 | [PitchBook] |
Analyst takeaway: the only company-specific engagement metric in the public record is the 22 minute session figure, which is directional rather than definitive; investors should treat it as a hypothesis about Guillotine's stickiness rather than a proven retention number.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Engagement metric from a single source (Business Insider); no third-party TAM cited.
Competitive Landscape
MIXED
Fantasy Life is positioned as a content-led, season-long-friendly alternative to the pick'em and DFS-first apps that dominate the venture-funded fantasy category.
| Company | Positioning | Stage / Funding | Notable Differentiator | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fantasy Life | Content-to-platform, season-long tools plus Guillotine knockout format | Seed, ~$7M | Matthew Berry brand, owned newsletter and app audience | [Crunchbase, Jul 2025] |
| Underdog Fantasy | Pick'em and best-ball DFS operator | Late stage, multi-hundred million raised per public reporting | Scaled DFS gameplay and marketing engine | [Betting Startups News, Jul 2025] |
| Sleeper | Social fantasy league app with picks product | Late stage per public reporting | League-centric social UX and Gen Z distribution | [Betting Startups News, Jul 2025] |
| Boom Fantasy | DFS and pick'em operator | Earlier stage per public reporting | Game format experimentation | [Crunchbase] |
The segment-by-segment map breaks into three groups. Incumbent DFS and pick'em operators (Underdog, PrizePicks-style products, Boom) compete primarily on gameplay mechanics, prize pool scale, and paid acquisition. League-platform challengers (Sleeper most prominently) compete on social UX and have demonstrated that owning the league chat and roster surface produces deep retention. Content brands (Fantasy Life, plus older incumbents like FantasyPros and the major sports media properties) compete on editorial trust and SEO and email distribution. Fantasy Life's pivot is an attempt to occupy two of those three lanes at once.
The defensible edge today is distribution. Berry's audience is large, loyal, and reachable for free through the existing newsletter and app, which is a meaningful capital advantage versus competitors paying performance-marketing rates to acquire fantasy users during a compressed preseason window [Business Insider, Jul 2025]. The Guillotine acquisition adds a differentiated game format that is not directly replicated by the major DFS operators, which keeps the company out of head-to-head pick'em comparisons [Sports Business Journal, Jul 2025]. The perishability question is whether that distribution edge holds once the product has to retain users on its own merits week to week, rather than because Berry sent the email.
The most exposed flank is gameplay depth versus Underdog and the pick'em category. Those operators have spent years iterating on contest design, payments, and responsible-gaming infrastructure, and they sit on regulatory teams Fantasy Life has not yet publicly built. If the company chooses to push into paid contest mechanics, it will be entering a lane where competitors have multi-year head starts. On the league-app side, Sleeper has spent years building the social graph that makes fantasy leagues sticky; Fantasy HQ will need either to integrate with that graph or convince commissioners to migrate, which is historically a slow motion.
The most plausible 18 month scenario: winner if Fantasy Life converts even a single-digit percentage of its newsletter readership into paying Fantasy Life+ subscribers and demonstrates that Guillotine retains players through a full NFL season; loser if the platform launch ships late or buggy into the August preseason window, since fantasy software has effectively one launch window per year and a missed season is a 12 month setback.
Opportunity
PUBLIC
If execution lands, Fantasy Life has a credible path to becoming the default season-long fantasy companion app for the NFL audience, a position no single venture-funded operator currently owns.
The headline opportunity. The largest plausible outcome is that Fantasy Life becomes the consumer brand that bundles fantasy content, league tools, and lightweight gameplay into one app for the tens of millions of Americans who play season-long NFL fantasy each year. That outcome is reachable rather than aspirational because the company starts with three assets that competitors typically have to manufacture: a recognizable on-air personality with a built-in audience, an existing free distribution channel in the daily newsletter, and a differentiated game format in Guillotine Leagues with reported 22 minute average sessions [Business Insider, Jul 2025] [Sports Business Journal, Jul 2025]. The investor syndicate, anchored by LRMR Ventures and SC Holdings and supplemented by sports and media operators including David Blitzer, Jeff Shell, Larry Fitzgerald, Chad Hurley, and LeBron James, is consistent with a company being built for distribution partnerships rather than a pure product-led growth play [Crunchbase, Jul 2025].
Growth scenarios.
| Scenario | What happens | Catalyst | Why it's plausible |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription scale | Fantasy Life+ becomes a meaningful paid tier across the newsletter and app base | Successful Fantasy HQ launch ahead of the 2025 NFL season | Newsletter and app already deliver free product; Business Insider reports the explicit funnel from free content to premium tools [Business Insider, Jul 2025] |
| Format ownership | Guillotine Leagues becomes a recognized fantasy format alongside redraft, dynasty, and best-ball | A breakout 2025 NFL season with viral knockout moments | 22 minute reported session time and acquired IP suggest a differentiated mechanic [Business Insider, Jul 2025] |
| Strategic platform partner | A sportsbook, media network, or league licenses or acquires the content and tools layer | Deal flow from the Blitzer / Shell / LRMR network | Investor base is heavy on operators with direct relevance to those buyers [Crunchbase, Jul 2025] |
What compounding looks like. The flywheel the pitch implies is: free daily content brings fans in, the app converts them into logged-in users, Fantasy HQ tools and Guillotine gameplay raise session time and retention, and that retained audience becomes both a subscription base for Fantasy Life+ and a defensible distribution asset that strategic partners (sportsbooks, leagues, networks) will pay to reach. Evidence that the flywheel is starting is partial: the audience and the content engine exist, the gameplay product exists in Guillotine, but the conversion math from free reader to paying user has not been disclosed.
The size of the win. Comparable transactions in the category give a frame of reference rather than a forecast. Pick'em and DFS operators have raised at multi-billion-dollar valuations in recent years per public reporting [Betting Startups News, Jul 2025], and sports content brands have historically been acquired by larger media and betting companies for strategic distribution. If the subscription scenario plays out and Fantasy Life builds a recurring paid base on top of its existing audience, a comparison to mid-sized subscription sports media businesses becomes reasonable; if the format ownership scenario plays out and Guillotine becomes a recognized fantasy mode, the company becomes interesting to any operator that wants to license or own a fantasy format alongside redraft and best-ball (scenario, not a forecast). The downside of a content-first business is well understood; the asymmetry here is that the seed round buys the company a real shot at the platform outcome.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Scenarios anchored to disclosed product roadmap and round details; comparable valuations cited from category reporting rather than disclosed Fantasy Life metrics.
Sources
PUBLIC
[Crunchbase] Fantasy Life - Crunchbase Company Profile and Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fantasy-life
[Business Insider, Jul 2025] An NBC Sports analyst just raised $7M for his fantasy sports startup. Read the pitch deck that helped him do it. | https://www.businessinsider.com/pitch-deck-sports-analyst-matthew-berry-fantasy-life-raises-millions-2025-7
[Betting Startups News, Jul 2025] This week: Fantasy Life raises $7M to launch fantasy sports product | https://news.bettingstartups.com/p/this-week-fantasy-life-raises-7m-to-launch-fantasy-sports-product-f5e1
[ZoomInfo] Fantasy Life - Overview, News and Similar companies | https://www.zoominfo.com/c/fantasy-life/479613718
[World Casino Directory] Fantasy Life Raises $7M to Expand with FantasyHQ and Guillotine Leagues | https://news.worldcasinodirectory.com/fantasy-sports-startup-secures-7-million-dollars-to-fuel-expansion-118937
[PitchBook] Fantasy Life 2025 Company Profile: Valuation, Funding and Investors | https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/519854-95
[Crunchbase, Jul 2025] Fantasy Life - News and Analysis | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fl-newsletter/news_and_analysis
[Sports Business Journal, Jul 2025] Matthew Berry's Fantasy Life raises $7M, launches FantasyHQ | https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Articles/2025/07/07/matthew-berrys-fantasy-life-raises-7m-launches-fantasyhq/
[LinkedIn] Matthew Berry's Fantasy Life | https://www.linkedin.com/company/fantasy-life-media
[LinkedIn] Fantasy Life | https://www.linkedin.com/company/fantasylifeapp
[CasinoBeats, Jul 2025] Fantasy Life unveils Fantasy HQ following $7M seed raise | https://news.bettingstartups.com/p/this-week-fantasy-life-raises-7m-to-launch-fantasy-sports-product-f5e1
[LinkedIn] Matthew Swing - Matthew Berry's Fantasy Life | https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattswing/
[LinkedIn] Dan Kaufman - Matthew Berry's Fantasy Life | https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-kaufman-615128/
Articles about Fantasy Life
- Fantasy Life Is Betting Matthew Berry Can Hold a Fantasy Manager for 22 Minutes a Session — With $7M in seed funding and the Guillotine Leagues acquisition, the NBC Sports analyst is turning his audience into a product.