Ep 291 - Megan Lanham from Rithmm

On this episode of the Business of Betting Podcast, Jeff Edelstein sits down with Megan Lanham, co-founder and CEO of Rithmm, to discuss the intersection of artificial intelligence and sports betting, the transition from elite coaching to tech entrepreneurship, and how predictive modeling is becoming accessible to the everyday bettor.

Hear them discuss:

• Megan’s unconventional career path, moving from D1 basketball player and coach to running a pharmaceutical recruiting company before attending MIT and founding an AI startup.
• The technical reality of Rithmm’s modeling, which utilizes machine learning to ingest billions of paid data points rather than relying on "fugazi" AI or basic scraping.
• Why she left the world of Division I coaching, citing the "parochial" nature of campus life and a gut feeling that she needed to stretch herself beyond the university bubble.
• The "serendipitous" origin story of Rithmm, including a chance meeting at a birthday party bar that turned a predictive modeling class project into a business.
• What separates Rithmm from the competition, specifically its "intelligence layer" that allows users to build, back-test, and copy successful models via a community leaderboard.
• The dynamic nature of the model, which must constantly recompute as lines move, players are announced out, and odds shift in real-time.
• Navigating the ethics of collegiate sports, including why Rithmm refuses to offer player props on college athletes and Megan’s concerns regarding the risks to students.
• New product innovations like "Scout," a proprietary AI layer designed to allow bettors to query complex models through voice and text to find the "why" behind a pick.
• The reality of the startup grind, from sharing desks in garden-level offices to raising over $8 million in funding to scale the platform.

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