Miami RIA raises $20m for Jake Paul sports betting venture

What do a Miami-based RIA and a social media star turned professional boxer have in common?

This isn’t the start of a lame joke, but rather the result of a most unusual and unexpected alliance.

Miami-based family office and RIA firm Aliya Capital Partners announced that earlier this month it had raised $20m from its clients and investors to help fund Betr, a new sports betting business launched by social media personality and professional boxer Jake Paul.

The firm led a series A1 funding round which initially closed last quarter alongside Miami venture capital company Fuel Venture Capital. Aliya has since continued to raise capital from investors until the latest funding round closes at the end of September.

Paul, a social media influencer and entrepreneur who is now a pro boxer, started his sports betting venture Betr alongside company co-founder and CEO Joey Levy and have billed their new venture as a ‘director-to-consumer’ sports micro-betting platform.

Unlike other betting apps that bet on the outcomes of entire games, Betr allows its users to wager on plays that resolve in a short time – such as pitches and at-bats of baseball games and plays and drives of football games.

‘Often, investing in early-stage companies is a hit or a miss, yet in the case of Betr, we think it is more akin to a hit or homerun, due to the leadership and talent that Joey and Jake possess,’ Aliya Capital wrote in a social media post.

‘Investing is a form of betting, in this case, we love the odds,’ they added.

Located on Miami’s Brickell Avenue, Aliya Capital Partners runs family office, investment and wealth management and RIA business lines.

It was founded by Ross Kestin and Emmanuel Hermann and its family office unit reported more than $800m in assets under management as of the end of December last year, according to its most recent form ADV.

The firm has worked on a number of similarly-structured equity arrangements and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, SpaceX, Robinhood, Impossible Food and others.

Aliya Capital was also one of a number of firms which contributed funds to Elon Musk’s now-defunct buyout of Twitter – the firm raised a total $360m from investors for the deal.

Betr’s initial series A funding round earlier this year managed to raise $30m and became oversubscribed over the course of a few months. In total, Betr has raised more than $50m and will look to grab market share from popular sports betting platforms like Draft Kings and FanDuel.

So far, Betr has attracted a slew of other high-profile celebrity investors, entrepreneurs and sports franchise owners like rapper Travis Scott, the co-owners of the San Francisco 49ers and Boston Celtics, Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott and former NFL stars like Richard Sherman and Dez Bryan, to name a few.

The app itself will be launched in the coming weeks, initially as a free-to-play venture available across the US. It launch comes as the Biden administration has pushed appeals courts to reinstate a deal that gave Florida’s Seminole Tribe control over the state’s sports betting industry after a Washington, D.C. judge previously ruled the agreement violated federal law.

The agreement between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Seminole Tribe, which was ratified by the state legislature last year, allowed, for the first time in Florida, legal participation in sports betting.