Frank Li is Building Empire Sports Exchange to Make Algorithmic Data Available to All Sports Bettors
Sports betting in the US is booming. Consumer betting platforms have become widely available, and financial institutions are beginning to enter the space—particularly after the CFTC just regulated prediction markets as legitimate trading venues.
But that doesn’t mean everyone has the same chance of winning. The average betting app user is stuck with basic odds and surface-level stats, while professional sportsbook traders work off dashboards with real-time game pace, possession data, and pricing inputs that never reach the public.
With the rise of prediction markets, however, there's now a developing community of algorithmic sports bettors looking for better data. As a former machine learning engineer and profitable sports bettor, Frank Li recognized that many bettors were stuck cobbling together tools to close that information gap. So he set out to build Empire Sports Exchange and democratize access to information for sports bettors.
Introducing Empire Sports Exchange: The sports prediction market built for all bettors
Empire Sports Exchange, or ESX, is a sports prediction market that equips any bettor with the algorithmic data feeds and real-time dashboards usually only available to sportsbook traders who price markets.
Most consumer betting platforms, like DraftKings, only surface odds and basic stats, while the real pricing inputs, like game pace, possession metrics, and team tempo, stay locked inside sportsbooks. With limited information and delayed insights, the average bettor is always at a disadvantage. Advanced consumer bettors have tried assembling their own data sources to close the information gap, but these manual processes risk breaking down during high stakes bets. And the professional traders have been leveraging this information for decades and profiting.
Empire Sports Exchange is providing faster data feeds, professional-grade dashboards, and an array of betting tools built directly on feedback from advanced bettors. With financial institutions entering the space and sports betting increasingly treated more like trading than gambling, Frank believes that winning platforms will democratize access to high-quality information and fast tools for bettors of all levels.
Frank’s journey to Empire Sports Exchange
Born in China, Frank’s life changed when at 15 his parents sent him to boarding school in Tennessee to pursue opportunities in the US. Frank was forced to adapt to a completely new environment and rebuild his social circles from scratch.
He later attended NYU to study Data Science, where, now comfortable navigating new groups, he quickly joined clubs to build a social group. Before long Frank had met a group of like-minded peers who shared an interest in the then emerging sports betting market.
As Frank moved on to several Data Scientist roles and later an MS in Data Science, he became engaged in the burgeoning community of algorithmic sports bettors hungry for high-quality data. He teamed up with his core friend group, four fellow engineers, and set out to build Empire Sports Exchange.
Bootstrapping the company with limited angel investment, Empire Sports Exchange has driven hundreds of signups for their beta products, regularly supporting dozens of active users on the platform.
Frank's advice for fellow founders
Although the role of ‘founder’ is often put on a pedestal and raising money sounds cool, Frank insists that being a founder is less about the title and more about solving a constant stream of problems you didn’t know existed — from user acquisition to product strategy to the legal side of running a company. “You really have to learn each thing going on and pick up every side of the business with sufficient details,” Frank explains. “Because how can you hire people or tell people what you’re looking for if you don’t have a bit of knowledge?”
Although Frank and his co-founders come from an engineering background, they’ve found that their primary focus for much of the journey so far has been marketing, not product. “Marketing is now the scarce resource, not engineering,” Frank has realized. “The cost of development is a lot lower than what it was two years ago. But knowing how to acquire customers and build an audience is really important.”
To learn more about Frank’s journey, you can follow him on LinkedIn and visit empiresportsexchange.com.
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