Megan Lanham didn't grow up around finance or software, she grew up in a town of 900 in the Illinois cornfields, chasing her two older brothers through basketball, football, and baseball games. That chase turned into a decade as a Division I basketball coach, where she learned the thing that still drives Rithmm today: winning isn't about talent alone, it's about finding the edge nobody else sees.
After coaching, Megan left sports to join an early-stage startup in life sciences recruiting — as employee, not founder. She helped scale the company internationally, eventually joined the executive team, and became CEO after it was acquired by a private equity group. Along the way, she went back to school at MIT for her MBA, looking to sharpen the analytical side of her game.
That decision changed everything. In MIT's notoriously difficult Data, Models, and Decisions class, Megan found herself building predictive models for coursework, and one day, mid-lecture, she started sketching the idea that would become Rithmm: sports betting had just been legalized across most of the country, but the predictive modeling tools that professional bettors relied on were nowhere near accessible to everyday fans. The data was expensive, the computation was expensive, and the tools that existed required a math background most people didn't have.
The question that stuck with her: what if anyone could use real predictive modeling; not just tips from a Discord channel or a guy on Twitter, but an actual model, transparent and trackable, built for them.
She had the idea. She needed a quant.
That's where Brian Beachkofski comes in. The two met by chance at a bar, introduced by a mutual friend who recognized Brian from the same MIT program. When Megan mentioned she was struggling through the same Data, Models, and Decisions class, Brian told her he used to teach it; he held a PhD and had spent his career applying predictive modeling to sports data for the U.S. Air Force. The next day, he sent her one message: let's build the best predictive modeling company in the history of sports.
Rithmm officially started in September 2022. The two spent a full year in stealth, building the technology to make real-time predictive modeling work at consumer scale, recalculating thousands of models every time a line moved, a player got injured, or new information hit the market.
Today, Rithmm is what Megan calls "betting intelligence in your pocket" — real predictive modeling, not just trend analysis, with thousands of user-built models available across the platform, and Scout, an AI betting assistant that can answer questions, build parlays, or even talk you out of a bad bet, in plain language.
