Max Polaczuk is the chief executive and AI architect of Levy Street, which Max co-founded with Chris Herrmann. Max sets the company’s technical direction and works directly on client systems and Levy Street’s own products.
Background
Max co-founded Sportsflare, a New Zealand company that built AI odds for esports betting, and led it as chief executive. Sportsflare was acquired by Tiidal Gaming Group in 2021 and sold to Entain in 2023 for C$13.25 million. Before that Max built large-scale AI systems at Xero.
Max’s 2020 paper with Tim Leathart, Temporal Probability Calibration, addresses calibrating predictions made on incomplete sequences and has been cited by researchers at Google Brain, Amazon Web Services and Alibaba.
Current work
Alongside Levy Street, Max is Vice President of AI at Blackpearl Group (NZX and ASX: BPG), where Levy Street engineers work with Blackpearl’s AI team on Bebop. Max is a joint first author of GTM-Bench, a benchmark for AI agents doing go-to-market research, and works across Levy Street’s products, including Lucent and World of ClaudeCraft.
Work
- SportsflareEsports odds technology co-founded by Max Polaczuk and Chris Herrmann, acquired by Entain in 2023 for C$13.25 million.
- GTM-BenchA 72-task benchmark for AI agents doing go-to-market research, published by Blackpearl Group and co-authored by Levy Street team members.
- BebopBlackpearl Group’s AI sales agent for small and medium businesses. Levy Street engineers work with Blackpearl’s AI team on it.
- Temporal probability calibrationA 2020 preprint by Tim Leathart and Maksymilian Polaczuk on calibrating predictions made from incomplete sequences.
- LucentAn agentic investment research platform that runs several frontier models together and grounds every output in citations.