An NBC Sports analyst just raised $7M for his fantasy sports startup. Read the pitch deck that helped him do it.
You get together with your friends, create a league, draft your favorite players, and face off every week throughout the NFL calendar to hopefully end up the winner and earn bragging rights until the season starts again.
Those are the basics of a fantasy league. But what if you don't know much about the NFL, and are looking for some assistance in picking out the best players for your roster for the games on Sunday? Or perhaps you know a lot about fantasy football and want to find content to interact with or similar people to talk with. Maybe you want to get into fantasy sports betting.
Fantasy Life, a brand started by NBC football analyst Matthew Berry, wants to offer something for every level of fantasy football fan — and it just secured a $7 million raise led by LRMR Ventures.
Fantasy sports is "the great equalizer," Berry told Business Insider. "It brings people together. From the kid in the mail room to the CEO, to rockstars, to kids, to grandmothers. Almost every one of our investors plays fantasy football."
Berry wrote Fantasy Life, a book that became a New York Times bestseller. It's about all the ins and outs of fantasy football, along with the social aspect of it, from punishments for coming in last to trash-talking with your friends. He quickly turned it into a newsletter. Austin Rief, the cofounder of Morning Brew, is a friend and advisor to Fantasy Life, and he told Berry that he had something big in the fantasy sports space.
"You're doing about 6 billion things wrong, and yet, even with one hand tied behind your back, you're still doing better numbers than we did in year three of Morning Brew," Berry recalled Rief telling him. (Morning Brew shares a parent company with BI.)
"That's when we pivoted," Berry said.
After that, the newsletter became a website, and Berry hired Eliot Crist as CEO. The Fantasy Life team has since grown from a newsletter to a full media company, with a website full of written content and radio and video shows about fantasy football.
In addition to fantasy football analysis, Fantasy Life offers betting analysis for all major sports leagues, videos on fantasy football, and ways to play through Guillotine Leagues, a unique fantasy football experience.
"We think we're in a really strong position to do something that's that's never been done before in the space," Crist said.
Part of Fantasy Life's growth included acquiring Guillotine Leagues, a new way to play fantasy sports with friends.
Traditional leagues have games that are played every week, and if you lose one week, you just drop in the standings. You rotate through players, adding, dropping, and trading depending on what your team needs.
Guillotine Leagues offers a different take. With its gameplay, if you lose, you are out, and all the players on your roster are released back into the pool to be picked up by everyone else who remains.
Berry said there were some key elements that made him want to buy Guillotine Leagues. One was the playtime, with users spending an average of 22 minutes on the platform per session, per the company.
"We think that Guillotine Leagues is the next big thing in fantasy football, and our goal is to have as many people try it as possible, because we think that once you do, you're going to be like, 'this is the only way I want to play fantasy,'" Berry said.
The deck opens with a slide about what Fantasy Life is.
This deck was pitched to investors in April of 2025. The description of Fantasy Life is "a fantasy sports, sports betting, and gaming company led by the biggest name in sports gaming."
Matthew Berry is a key figure in the fantasy sports space.
Berry has been working in the fantasy sports space for years, at various places like ESPN and NBC Sports. He is currently a cast member for NBC's Football Night in America.
Guillotine Leagues is a gaming platform that Fantasy Life thinks will change the way users play.
The slide says the unique play style that Guillotine Leagues offers has paid off, with 22 minutes spent on the platform in an average session.
Fantasy Life has lots of plans for the rest of this year, including expanding 'paid-to-play' games (where users buy in with real money)
The startup also plans a full redesign for web, iOS, and Android, and a Fantasy Life+ integration with tools and extra content for players.
Fantasy Life has a goal in mind — to be the best fantasy product on the internet.
Mike's Hard Lemonade has partnered with Fantasy Life on FantasyHQ, a place for personalized team advice, to help optimize lineups and real-time score updates. The company has also worked with other fantasy football platforms to integrate its content.
Fantasy Life licenses content to LG, Roku and Fubo, SiriusXM, iHeart Radio, and a360 media.
Through those partners, Fantasy Life says it has reached over 112.8 million households combined.
The company raised $2 million in a friends and family round in 2023.
Some of the investors in that round include Casey Wasserman, Tony Khan, Josh Allen, and Austin Ekeler.
Fantasy Life has grown its company from 11 to 23 full-time employees.
The deck says the company was recognized as one of the "best places to work in sports" by both Front Office Sports and Sports Business Journal in 2024.
Fantasy Life plans to use the funds from the seed raise for a few different things.
These include paying costs related to the Guillotine Leagues acquisition, developing its own technology, using paid marketing, and developing a premium product.
The deck ends with a 'thank you' slide.
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