# Max Polaczuk

URL: https://levystreet.com/people/max-polaczuk/
Updated: 2026-10-19

Max Polaczuk is the CEO and AI Architect at Levy Street, the Wellington AI engineering company. Co-founded and led Sportsflare, acquired by Entain in 2023.

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](/research/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](/portfolio/bebop/). Max is a joint first author of [GTM-Bench](/portfolio/gtm-bench/), a benchmark for AI agents doing go-to-market research, and works across Levy Street's products, including [Lucent](/portfolio/lucent/) and [World of ClaudeCraft](/portfolio/world-of-claudecraft/).

Published by Levy Street (https://levystreet.com), Wellington, New Zealand.