The pitch trick that helped an eSports startup raise $20 million when VCs only wanted AI

Earlier this year, Lucra Sports Founder and CEO Dylan Robbins did something no one else has ever done.

Acquired renowned public investor Cathie Wood and her ARK Invest Venture Fund to lead a startup fundraising round.

Lucra announced last month that it had raised a $20 million Series B, led by the ARK fund, with participation from several other VCs. Robbins attracted ARK even though the fund had previously been badly burned in a similar eSports company: Skillz, a skill-based gaming platform in which the fund invested heavily before the divestiture with a loss.

What’s more, Dylan landed this big fish as an investor even though his company isn’t in the one area all VCs are chasing right now: AI.

Lucra offers interactive white label game contests as a new type of loyalty program for consumer-facing businesses. Instead of, for example, earning points for a coupon, Lucra customers offer online tournaments for prizes or support friendly bets between their customers on who will win games. His clients include Five Iron Golf, Dave & Buster’s and Chess King.

Robbins told us there were two secrets to how he attracted a major investor against such odds:

1. Be friendly with everyone, everywhere because you never know when a casual conversation will turn into your big investor.

2. Drive your race with AI even if you’re not a famous AI scientist and you don’t build models, agents, or anything else AI.

In the first spot, the seeds for Lucra’s fundraising journey began when Robbins was playing darts in a New York bar. She met another guy at darts and they enjoyed a few games together.

“Six months later, we run into each other again at the bar. The same darts bar. It’s like, ‘Nice to see you.’ How’s he doing?’ And we got to talking and I asked him what he did for work. And he told me he worked at ARK,” Robbins recalled.

Robbins told him about Lucra, and the contact introduced him to ARK’s investment team, which ended up writing a small check in the Series A round.

“My first piece of advice in all of this is to never know who you’re talking to. Just go, be nice, meet people, have fun,” says Robbins. Let that lead to good discussions, which will lead to recommendations, he said.

Flash forward a few years to the end of 2025, when AI has overtaken venture funding like honeysuckle.

Lucra Sports had really hit their stride with their white label service. It was set to raise a Series B to fuel growth and new ideas, such as adding mini-games to its offerings. (Lucra just invested in a minigame development partner to develop this feature.)

But Robbins kept running into an AI-shaped wall.

“We were pushing the fourth quarter of 2025, which was then, as it is now, a sort of culmination of AI chaos,” Robbins said. “One in three calls, on the front line, they’d stop the meeting and say, ah, we’re only investing in AI now, I don’t want to waste your time. To the point where they wouldn’t even let me talk.”

The rest told him they were investing in AI only after hearing the pitch.

So Robbins tried a new tactic. He adapted his playing field and deck to discuss AI right out of the gate. The revised pitch argued that if AI works, people will have more free time to play games with friends at the bar or online – so his business will be a winner – and if it doesn’t, a bet without AI starts to look like smart diversification. It was a hedge either way.

“It was a small group of people who would really take it seriously,” he said of his pitch. ARK, thankfully, was one of them. Once committed, the lead investor made introductions to other VCs to help complete the round.

Good business figures were all based on that, including “consistent year-over-year growth, not just a boom,” he said.

The final lesson Robbins learned was that, especially for a non-AI business, VCs want to hear a big dream. Robbins had one: a total addressable market for anyone who plays games of every kind, from pickleball to Wordle.

“So our TAM is pretty much every American who is 18 to 70, right?” Robbins said. Even so, he asked a VC to send a rejection that he printed and posted on the wall.

“I sent them our growth chart and our TAM, which was like crazy, in the right growth potential, huge, big, billions of TAM. And the answer was: “TAM is too small.” That was the answer. Like, our growth rate was too slow,” he said.

He said this was a “reminder” for him to “think even more”.

“I have to put myself in that mindset and really fight for the edge if I want to raise venture capital money,” he added.