The pitch trick that helped an esports startup raise $20 million when venture capitalists just wanted AI

Earlier this year, Action sports Founder and CEO Dylan Robbins has done something no one else has done before.

He has landed renowned general investor Cathie Wood and her ARK Invest Venture Fund a lead in a startup fundraising round.

Lucra announced last month It raised a $20 million Series B led by ARK Fundwith the participation of several other venture capitalists. Robbins attracted ARK even though the fund had previously taken a hit on a similar e-sports company: Skillz, a skill-based gaming platform where the fund Invested heavily before divestment At a loss.

What’s more, Dylan landed this big fish as an investor even though his company isn’t in the one area that all venture capital firms are currently chasing: artificial intelligence.

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

Robbins told us there are two secrets to how he got a major investor amid such difficulties:

1. Be friendly with everyone, anywhere Because you never know when a casual conversation will turn into a major investor.

2. Drive your presentation with AI Even if you are not a famous AI scientist and you are not building models, agents or anything related to AI.

As for the first point, the seeds of Lucra’s fundraising journey began when Robbins was playing darts in a New York bar. He met another man at darts, and they enjoyed some games together.

“Six months later, we bumped into each other at the bar again. Same darts bar. It was like, ‘Nice to see you.’ How’s it going?” And we talked and I asked him what he did for work. “He told me he worked at ARK,” Robbins recalls.

Robbins told him about Lucra and the contact introduced him to the investment team at ARK, who ended up writing a small check for his Series A round.

“My number one piece of advice about all of this is you never know who you’re talking to,” Robbins says. “Just walk around, be nice, meet people, and have a good time.” Let that lead to good conversations, which will lead to introductions, he said.

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

Lucra Sports has already found its way through the white labeling service. It was prepared to raise a Series B to fuel growth and new ideas such as adding mini-games to its offerings. (Lucra just invested in a microgame development partner to build this capability.)

But Robbins kept hitting an AI-shaped wall.

“We were raising our money in the fourth quarter of 2025, which then, as now, was the peak of the AI ​​chaos,” Robbins said. “One out of every three calls, the first line, they would stop the meeting and say, oh, we’re only investing in AI now, I don’t want to waste your time. So much so that they wouldn’t even let me present my ideas.”

The rest told him that they were investing in AI only after they heard the offer.

So Robbins tried a new tactic. He adjusted the pitch and pitch of his voice to discuss AI right out of the gate. The revised presentation argued that if the AI ​​worked, people would have more free time to play games with friends in the pub or online – so its action would be a winner – and if it didn’t work, non-AI betting would start to look like smart diversification. It was a hedge either way.

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

All of this was underpinning good business fundamentals, he said, including “sustained year-on-year growth, not just a single boom.”

Robbins’ final lesson is that, especially for non-AI businesses, venture capitalists want to hear dream big. Robbins had one: a total addressable market for anyone who played games of any kind, from baseball to Wordle.

“So our TAM is pretty much every American between the ages of 18 and 70, right?” Robbins said. However, he had a VC send him a rejection letter and he printed it out and hung it on the wall.

“I sent them our growth chart and our TAM, which was crazy, hitting the right growth potential, huge, big, billions of TAM. And the response was: ‘TAM is too small.’ That was the response. ‘Our growth rate has been too slow,’” he said.

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

“I have to put myself in that mindset and really swing it if I want to raise venture capital money,” he added.