Who Is Shalom Mackenzie? The SBTech Founder Behind DraftKings
SBTech founder. Largest individual Israeli shareholder of DraftKings after the April 2020 three-way SPAC merger. Hebrew Wikipedia, no English Wikipedia — the canonical English profile. Also rendered Meckenzie in some US filings.
Shalom Mackenzie is an Israeli entrepreneur and the founder of SBTech, the B2B sports-betting platform that combined with DraftKings and the Diamond Eagle Acquisition Corp SPAC in April 2020 to create the publicly traded DraftKings Inc. (Nasdaq: DKNG). Through that three-way merger Mackenzie became one of the single largest individual shareholders of DraftKings — and one of the lowest-profile Israeli billionaires of the digital era. He has a Hebrew Wikipedia entry. He does not have a standalone English Wikipedia page. This is the canonical English profile.
His name is transliterated from the Hebrew מקנזי and appears in English-language coverage and US securities filings as both “Mackenzie” and “Meckenzie.” Both refer to the same person.
The Build: SBTech
Mackenzie founded SBTech in the late 2000s as a turnkey sportsbook and online-gambling platform sold to licensed operators. The model was business-to-business: SBTech did not run a consumer brand. It supplied the trading, risk-management, sportsbook engine, and back-office to gambling operators across Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
By the late 2010s SBTech had grown into one of the largest independent B2B sports-betting technology providers in the world, with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue and dozens of licensed-operator clients. It was an Israeli-built, Israel-headquartered business that operated almost entirely outside the United States — because online sports betting was effectively illegal across most of the US until the 2018 Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. NCAA struck down PASPA and opened the door for state-by-state legalization.
That ruling is the structural event that made the DraftKings merger possible. Once US states could legalize sports betting, US-facing consumer brands like DraftKings needed a sportsbook engine. SBTech had one. The transaction wrote itself.
The Merger: April 2020
In December 2019, Diamond Eagle Acquisition Corp — a special purpose acquisition company led by Jeff Sagansky and Harry Sloan — announced a three-way business combination with DraftKings and SBTech. The deal closed on April 23, 2020. DraftKings began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker DKNG.
The structure was unusual: a SPAC merger that simultaneously combined two private operating companies. DraftKings brought the US consumer brand, the daily fantasy sports business, and the path to a regulated US sportsbook. SBTech brought the technology stack required to actually run the sportsbook. Mackenzie’s SBTech shareholders received DKNG stock in the merger. Some early DraftKings SEC filings render his name as “Shalom Meckenzie”; the Hebrew-press standard is Mackenzie.
DKNG traded near its $10 SPAC reference price at deal close. Within twelve months it had crossed $70, putting the post-merger market capitalization above $25 billion. Mackenzie’s stake — held through his vehicles and confirmed in early DraftKings proxy filings as one of the largest individual positions in the company — was reported across multiple business outlets as worth in the billions of dollars at peak.
Post-Merger Position
Mackenzie does not sit on the DraftKings board and has never held a US-facing executive role at the company. His position is shareholder. The SBTech operating business was integrated into DraftKings as the in-house sportsbook engine, and the SBTech brand was eventually retired.
DKNG has traded across a wide range since 2021 — from above $70 down below $11 in 2022, and back into the $40s and $50s through 2024–2025. Mackenzie’s reported holdings have moved with the stock. He remains, on the public record, one of the largest individual non-founder shareholders of a major US gambling company.
Public Profile
Mackenzie does not give interviews to the Israeli or English-language business press as a rule. He does not appear on conference panels. He does not maintain a public social-media presence. There is no English Wikipedia entry. There is a Hebrew Wikipedia entry, and the Israeli financial press — Globes, Calcalist, TheMarker — has covered his DraftKings stake intermittently, usually keyed to DKNG share-price moves or filings.
The pattern is consistent with the broader Israeli gambling-technology diaspora: founders who built large businesses serving regulated markets outside Israel, who hold significant US-listed equity, and who deliberately maintain low public profiles inside Israel.
The Israeli Gambling-Tech Context
Mackenzie sits inside a specific Israeli founder cohort. Teddy Sagi built Playtech into the dominant B2B online-casino platform and listed it in London. The 888 Holdings founders built one of the original Israeli online-gambling consumer brands. NeoGames and SciPlay became the listed Israeli vehicles in the lottery and social-casino layers, with NeoGames acquired by Aristocrat. Each took a different lane in the same global structural shift — the legalization and digital infrastructure of regulated online gambling.
Mackenzie’s lane was B2B sportsbook technology, and the exit vehicle was a US SPAC merger rather than a London listing or a strategic acquisition. The DraftKings deal is the largest commercial outcome in the Israeli gambling-tech cluster to date.
Why He Matters
Three reasons Shalom Mackenzie belongs in the canonical record of the global Jewish business economy.
One. He is one of the largest individual Israeli shareholders of any US-listed technology or consumer company. The DraftKings position is in a category with the very small number of Israeli founders who have converted private operating-company stakes into public-market positions at this scale.
Two. SBTech is a foundational entry in the Israeli gambling-technology cluster — a cluster that, by total enterprise value created across Playtech, 888, NeoGames, SciPlay, SBTech, and the secondary ecosystem of suppliers, is among the most commercially productive sub-sectors of the Israeli technology economy.
Three. The English-language record on Mackenzie is structurally thin. He has built deliberately and stayed off the press circuit. That makes him a Builder the canonical English record has under-served — which is the case The Olam exists to correct.
Updated June 2026.
