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

Earlier this year, Career Games founder and CEO Dylan Robbins did what no one else had done.

He found well-known entrepreneur Cathie Wood and ARK Invest Venture Fund to lead the way in the startup investment.

Lucra announced last month that it raised $ 20 million Series B, led by the ARK fundwith the help of several other VCs. Robbins attracted ARK despite the fact that the fund was burned in a similar eSports company: Skillz, a gaming platform with the same skill that the fund was burned. invested a lot of money before entering the water at a loss.

On top of that, Dylan landed this big fish as an investor even though his company is not in the area that all VCs are chasing: AI.

Lucra offers an integrated white label sports competition as a new type of loyalty program for businesses that serve consumers. In fact, let’s say that, getting coupons, Lucra customers offer online tournaments to win prizes, or they support friendly betting among their customers on who will win a game. His clients include Five Iron Golf, Dave & Buster’s, and Chess King.

Robbins told us that there are two secrets to how he found a great entrepreneur against the odds:

1. Be friendly to everyone, everywhere because you never know when a simple conversation will turn into your biggest investor.

2. Track your voice with AI even if you’re not a famous AI scientist and you’re not building models, agents, or anything for AI.

At first glance, the seeds of Lucra’s fundraising journey began when Robbins was playing darts in a bar in New York. She met a guy on the dartboard, and they enjoyed a few games together.

“Six months later, we met again at the same shooting range, and it’s like, ‘Nice to see you. And we started talking and I asked him what he did for a living. And he told me he worked at ARK,'” Robbins recalled.

Robbins told him about Lucra and his connection led him to the investment team at ARK, which ended up writing a small check in its Series A round.

“My first piece of advice in all of this is you never know who you’re talking to. Just walk around, be open, meet people, have fun,” says Robbins. Let that lead to a good conversation, which will lead to an introduction, he said.

Fast forward a few years to the end of 2025, when AI has caught on to business ventures like honeysuckle.

Lucra Sports had definitely found its way with white labels. It was ready to upgrade the Series B to grow in size with new ideas such as adding mini games to its offerings. (Lucra only invested in the development of mini-games to make this.)

But Robbins ran into an AI-generated wall.

“We were growing in Q4 of 2025, which was then, if not now, like the AI ​​frenzy,” Robbins said. “One out of every three calls, the first line, stops the meeting and says, oh, we’re just investing in AI now, I don’t want to waste your time.

Everyone else told him they were just investing in AI after hearing the word.

So Robbins tried a new approach. He changed his tune with his ship to discuss the AI ​​out of the gate. The revised statement argued that if AI works, people will have more free time to play with friends in a bar or on the Internet – therefore its business will be successful – and if not, betting without AI will begin to look like different types of intelligence. It was a fence.

“It was a small group of people who would take it seriously,” he said of his statement. ARK, fortunately, was one of them. Once committed, the investment manager introduced other VCs to fill the round.

Underneath it all was a good business foundation, including “a consistent year-over-year growth, not just one run,” he said.

The last lesson Robbins learned was that, especially for non-AI businesses, VCs want to hear big dreams. Robbins had one: the perfect market for anyone who plays any type of game, from pickleball to Wordle.

“So our TAM is almost every American between the ages of 18 and 70, right?” Robbins said. Even so, he asked another VC to send a copy that he printed and put on the wall.

“I sent them our growth chart and our TAM, which was like crazy, to the right size, big, big, billions of TAM. And the answer was: ‘TAM is too small.’ He replied like that. Like, our size was too small,” he said.

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

“I have to put myself in that frame of mind and run for the fences if I want to raise business capital,” he added.