Underdog

Player protection is a core part of how we build at Underdog. This week we announced our partnership with Birches Health, the national leader in specialized gambling disorder treatment, to expand the responsible play resources available in our app and give players who may need it a direct line to real, licensed clinical care. This isn't a hotline number buried in a settings menu. It's confidential, insurance-covered, and built by clinicians who specialize in gambling-specific treatment. And a core part of our Responsible Play initiative that puts resources, tools, education, and support in every player's hands. Learn more about this partnership: https://lnkd.in/gikJnd39

In February, someone posed a question in Slack that led to one of our biggest feats yet. We bet both of our native mobile apps on React Native and an AI-first build process — on a platform nobody on the team had shipped at scale. Three weeks to prove it. Three more weeks building tooling and guardrails. Nine weeks rebuilding the core. Then we opened the doors to every feature team we had — and our contributor count grew 5x and output per person doubled. We cut our first release ahead of NFL kickoff. We can now deliver about 95% of our updates over the air. Six months from a question in a Slack channel to running the business on React Native. Here's the full story from our team: https://lnkd.in/g5yhGvA4

This is Camp Underdog: we build, compete, and grow together—and most importantly, have a lot of fun along the way. Over the summer, we flew in over 400 employees from around the world for a week together in Arizona. From our first-ever Camp UD Awards to our own prediction market built into the app for internal competitions, this week is the anchor moment that brings our best ideas and our best people to life. It's also where we got a sneak peek to celebrate the recent rebrand as a team. As a fully remote company, we believe in making work just as fun as our mission: make sports more fun. New logo, same team, one mission.

At Underdog, we’re always looking for new and creative ways to bring more to our community of customers. Our latest exciting addition: trading cards. The cultural moment happening between sports and collectibles is real. We knew we had to capture it, connect it, and bring it to life in the app. And we found the perfect path. Enter: Underdog RIPS. Open digital packs, reveal real cards. Sell or ship them directly to your door. A new way to play, collect, and enjoy sports. And have a ton of fun doing it. In the same Underdog app our users know and love. We brought together a tiger team of hustlers that are obsessed with the hobby and obsessed with building. Their hunger to share their favorite pastime with others fueled their ambition to stand up this brand new business line in just three months. And now, less than a week from launch, we’ve seen nearly 2 million packs purchased. Off to the races and truly ripping. We’re just heating up 🔥

We’re excited to introduce our new national campaign featuring Paul Walter Hauser as "The Dog", a playful, overly confident guru who guides sports fans through making picks on Underdog. To quote Devin Bellamy, our Senior Director of Integrated Marketing: “Sports fans get us, and we get sports fans, so we’ve been leaning into our rascal personality more and more. Paul was perfect because he embodies the playful nature of Underdog. His ability to make people laugh by staying authentic made him the ideal partner. Sports fans are going to love these spots, and they reflect what Underdog is all about: making sports more fun.” Take a peek at one of six spots - coming to your screen soon 👀 - and read more about the campaign: https://lnkd.in/ez-eB87H.

Two months down. Still just getting started. Our 2026 grad class made it through the first stretch — starting from Blitz Week in Chicago to making an impact. Two reads on what the last couple months have actually looked like at Underdog. 👇 https://lnkd.in/p/gmQGaU8P https://lnkd.in/p/gWQszBun

In June we brought employees together at Camp Underdog and for one full day we cleared the calendar and told everyone to go build. Go learn everything you didn’t have time for before this and just do things. Half of it broke. Some of it's shipping. Watch how it went down.

We’re excited to announce that Underdog made the 2026 Inc. 5000 list, an annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in America: https://lnkd.in/eBGHyVTH. This recognition is a testament to the incredible team we have at Underdog and our unrelenting approach to making sports more fun. As our CEO Jeremy Levine always says, by investing in great people who want to help build great products that sports fans actually want, we’re going to be able to build one of the biggest companies in the space. We’ve grown a lot since launching in 2020, but we’re still just getting started 🚀 #Inc5000

For the 2026 World Cup, Underdog hosted The Friendlies, a series of employee-led watch parties built on one idea: bring our community together and create more opportunities to connect with our users, in person, all around the country. No open invites. We targeted our top users near each city and kept gatherings small and intimate, so there was real face time with the people actually building the product. Product, engineering, marketing, CS, talent, promo, even senior leadership all showed up to host. By the numbers: - 29 watch parties across 20 cities - 47 employees stepped up to host - 500+ UD merch items given out But the turnout was never the point. The real win was the direct line it created between our users and our team—hearing feedback live, troubleshooting on the spot, and bringing it straight back to the people building the product. All while rooting for Team USA and onboarding new users along the way 🇺🇲 To every employee who hosted or showed up across all 20 cities: THANK YOU One Nation, Underdog.

We are extremely proud today to share some extraordinary news: IG Group has announced it has agreed to acquire Underdog. Our CEO and co-founder Jeremy Levine summed it up best: “We built Underdog by creating the best experience for fans, and we've proven we can build the best products no matter how the regulatory landscape shifts. It’s why we've taken off in prediction markets since we launched last year. Now, with our own exchange and by joining IG Group, we're going to take an incredible leap in what we can offer customers, and make Underdog the place to make predictions on sports, and beyond. IG Group’s scale, expertise, resources and reach are going to unlock our potential, expand what we've built, and bring our products to more audiences. I couldn't be more excited about what we're going to do together.” We will operate as a commercially standalone business, maintaining our own brand, management team and operational platform. Today’s announcement is the result of six years of incredibly hard work from our entire team, past and present, innovative product-first thinking and an unrelenting commitment to finding new and exciting ways to engage with sports fans and to simply make sports more fun. From our new home at IG Group, with their scale and resources, we are going to bring so much more to our customers. Press release from IG Group here: https://lnkd.in/g6v9UdUM