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You don’t need to be an AI startup to raise. Lucra has $20M to prove it. | Equity Podcast

Slapping “AI” on your startup’s pitch deck is basically table stakes right now. When a founder raised $20 million from Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest for an eSports gamification loyalty startup without those two letters in the spotlight, it got us wondering how the conversation even started — especially when ARK had already been burned by…

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Slapping “AI” on your startup’s pitch deck is basically table stakes right now. When a founder raised $20 million from Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest for an eSports gamification loyalty startup without those two letters in the spotlight, it got us wondering how the conversation even started — especially when ARK had already been burned by a company operating in the same space.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Julie Bort sits down with Dylan Robbins, founder and CEO of Lucra, the white-label platform turning friendly competitions into loyalty programs for brands like golf courses, arcades, and pickleball clubs.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

1:43 How Lucra works

4:10 Meeting ARK Invest over darts and landing the Series B

7:24 Pitching a non-AI startup during peak AI mania

10:41 The growth metrics that won investors over

13:02 Overcoming ARK’s bad experience with Skillz and the B2B pivot

20:43 What’s next: the mini games vertical

29:25 Outro

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1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. @jeffcraymore

    May 20, 2026 at 6:07 pm

    Series B, you are not a startup. You have serious customers and active growth. And he said that. Over years. That’s not a startup.

    Reply

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Take a look inside Bluecore Energy, a company newly out of stealth, building a prototype nuclear power plant on a barge.

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Unbox the $1,299 iPhone 18 Pro Max in black with us 📲🖤 #iphone18promax #blackiphone #apple #unboxing #iphone18pro

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Unbox the $1,299 iPhone 18 Pro Max in black with us 📲🖤 #iphone18promax #blackiphone #apple #unboxing #iphone18pro

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