Thanks to an app, 382 investors in Mage await another shot at the winner’s circle.

Doxtator and Chamberlin grew up in Kalamazoo, Mich., and attended Western Michigan University. Doxtator, who now lives in Los Angeles, went to a car auction and noticed a company selling shares in cars. He was intrigued by the idea and started thinking about ways to improve upon that concept. Then he went to Santa Anita racetrack. Days later, he messaged his old friend Chamberlin, a lifelong equestrian who had moved to Lexington, Ky., and started to dabble in horse racing, and pitched the idea.

“We thought of the horse racing audience as like a bull’s-eye kind of target,” Doxtator, 40, said. “You’ve got the core audience in the middle. Then you’re one ring out and it’s the casual fan that might go to the races a bit, pays attention, and then you go another ring out, and you’ve got people that pretty much only watch the Derby and have never really been to the track. You put those two outer rings together, and if you can convert even 5 to 10 percent of those, it’s a game changer for horse racing.”

Doxtator and Chamberlin launched the app in early 2021, and by the summer they had partnered with WinStar Farm and were offering shares in Country Grammer, who went on to win the $12 million Dubai World Cup in 2022. They have also partnered with top bloodstock agents, which is how they connected with Restrepo and landed a share of Mage.

About 80 of the 382 people who invested in Mage through Commonwealth were at the Derby. And so that melting pot of a group rode Mage straight into the winner’s circle on the first Saturday in May, leading to perhaps the biggest winner’s circle party in Derby history — even Mage looked small in the middle of it.

“It’s one of those weird things you don’t want to talk about too much, because you don’t want to jinx yourself or whatever, but we told people, if we win, just go,” Chamberlin, 32, said. “You have your Commonwealth pin on. Nobody’s going to stop you.”