Mojo Aims To Separate Itself As The Leading Sports Stock Market

When Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore have partnered together — no matter what the venture has been — they’re determined to hit a home run.

This time around, the two co-owners of the Minnesota Timberwolves — they combined to own 40% of the NBA team — are founding partners of Mojo, which coined itself as “the stock market for sports.” Since its inception, the company has raised over $100 million, including a $75 million Series A funding. The NFL Players Association, The Chainsmokers’ Mantis Ventures, Chris Rock, Gary Vaynerchuk, Michael Kives, Jason Derulo, Jack Abraham, Morris Bailey, and more have already invested in Mojo since its inception in 2021.

“Mojo is the dream that every kid has when you are little, once you start learning about stocks,” Lore said during the Sports Business Journal Technology Summit in March. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could invest in players like stocks?

“Vinit and Bart, the co-founders, along with A-Rod and I, came up with a breakthrough solution to make it truly operate like a sports stock market, like everyone dreams it would. It’s very simple, you can trade in and out of a player and when the player retires it will payout based on a known stat – so it gives the player true intrinsic value.”

Mojo is led by CEO Vinit Bharara, the brother of former United States attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara. Currently, Mojo is licensed and regulated to operate only in New Jersey as a legal sportsbook. However, it is working to expand throughout multiple states by the end of 2023.

“We want the ordinary fan to invest in athletes like stocks, and we can do it now because the laws have changed,” Bharara said in a Zoom interview. “We can see that in the near future, all of the states will have some version of online gambling permitted so we can raise capital and build the best team.”

Mojo enables fans to bet on the careers of hundreds of athletes and trade those holdings like stocks. If an athlete outperforms expectations, the stock price will rise, and vice versa. And just like the real stock market, if anything happens to a player, the stock will change accordingly.

The first meetings took place in the fall of 2021 and they raised $10 million off the bat in a seed round, Bharara said. Officially, Mojo launched in September of 2022, allowing fans to invest in the career projections of NFL players.

“This is a huge challenge,” Bharara said. “If it is a true market, there needs to be liquidity. We have to be the house and guarantee liquidity for the customer, which means we are the ones taking all of the risk.

“It’s predicting the careers of athletes. We had to hire a ton of data scientists and engineers, and we had to come up with algorithms. We have to figure out what the public wants because we want to have a balanced book.”

In March, Mojo began beta testing its “liquid trading” feature on some NBA and March Madness NCAAB games. Liquid trading enables users to trade during a game with a fair and real-time market price, so they can get in and out of bets at their own discretion.

The NCAA product experienced the best four-day run in its history, a company representative said. Each day, Mojo set a new high in the number of single-day trades made on the platform. A Mojo spokesperson said that users who made a liquid prop bet spent an average of 88 minutes per day in the app, the highest monthly average in company history. And 34% of Mojo traders opened multiple positions on the same bet, just like day traders.

And the origin of Mojo goes quite a ways back. Bharara and Lore grew up together in New Jersey and, in the late 1990s, they began to conceptualize how cool it would be to invest in athletes like stocks.

“This was in the eBay and eTrade days,” Bharara said. “We made a sports card stock market. That was the mechanism to pick a player and invest in that player’s career. We created ThePit, which was the first sports card stock market in the country. We sold it to The Topps Company in 2001.”

Mojo has high aspirations for its concept. Simply put, they want to change the sports landscape. They are taking the debates like “Michael Jordan or LeBron James” as the greatest NBA player of all time and putting it into the hands of fans.

Looking forward, Mojo aims to expand by inking market access agreements with different states. By the end of 2023, they plan to officially release Mojo in at least one more state.

The startup will also use its data from its NBA and NCAA beta tests to see how it will fare by expanding outside of the NFL.

“Launching into a different sport is extremely challenging and difficult,” Bharara said. “March Madness was a big exercise for us. We’re trying to make our own contribution to make sports more fun.”

Fans can continue to test out this sports stock market heading into the Final Four weekend.