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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.
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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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