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The pitch trick that helped an eSports startup raise $20M when VCs only wanted AI
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Earlier this year, Lucra Sports founder and CEO Dylan Robbins did something that no one else has ever done. He landed famed public investor Cathie Wood and her ARK Invest Venture Fund as a lead in a startup fundraising round. Lucra announced last month that it 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 gotten badly burned on a similar eSports company: Skillz, a skill-based gaming platform in which the fund invested heavily before divesting at a loss. On top of that, Dylan landed this big fish as an investor even though his company is not in the one area that all VCs are currently chasing: AI. Lucra offers white-label interactive gaming competitions as a novel kind of loyalty program for businesses that serve consumers. Rather than, say, earning points toward a coupon, Lucra’s clients offer online tournaments for prizes, or supports friendly wagers between their customers on who will win games. Its customers include Five Iron Golf, Dave & Buster’s, and Chess King. Robbins told us there were two secrets in how he landed a big-name investor against such odds: 1. Be friendly to everyone, anywhere because you never know when a casual conversation will turn into your major investor. 2. Lead your pitch with AI even if you aren’t a famed AI scientist and aren’t building models, agents, or anything AI. To the first point, the seeds to Lucra’s fundraising journey began when Robbins was playing darts in a New York bar. He met another guy at the dartboard, and they enjoyed a few games together. “Six months later, we ran into each other at the bar again. The same darts bar. It’s like, ‘Good to see you. How’s it going?’ 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 the investment team at ARK, which wound up writing a small check in his Series A round. “My first piece of advice on all of this is you never know who you’re talking to. Just go around, be nice, meet people, have fun,” Robbins says. Let that lead to good conversations, which will lead to introductions, he said. Flash forward a few years to the end of 2025, when AI had overtaken venture funding like honeysuckle. Lucra Sports had really found its lane with its white-labeling service. It was ready to raise a Series B to fuel growth and new ideas like adding mini-games into its offerings. (Lucra just invested in a mini-game development partner to build out this capability.) But Robbins kept running into an AI-shaped wall. “We were raising in Q4 of 2025, which was then, like even now, kind of peak AI mayhem,” 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. To the point where they wouldn’t even let me pitch.” The rest told him they were only investing in AI after they heard the pitch. So Robbins tried a new tactic. He adjusted his pitch and his deck to discuss AI right out of the gate. The revised pitch argued that if AI works, people are going to have more free time to play games with friends at the bar or online — hence his business will be a winner — and if it doesn’t, a non-AI bet starts to look like smart diversification. It was a hedge either way. “It was a small cohort of people that would really take it seriously,” he said of his pitch. ARK, fortunately, was one of them. Once committed, the lead investor made introductions to other VCs to help fill out the round. Underpinning all of this were good business fundamentals, including “consistent year over year growth, not just one spurt,” 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 of anyone who plays games of any kind, from pickleball to Wordle.
When the founders of a mental health app for men called Mental saw that one feature — AI interactive audio — was resonating wildly with their users, they knew they were onto something. And so the idea for a new, and hopefully safer, kind of AI therapy app was born, which they called The Path, co-founder and CEO Anson Whitmer tells TechCrunch. Then famed author and motivational speaker Tony Robbins grew so enamored with this startup; he scooched in as a co-founder. The Path has now raised $14.3 million in seed funding led by Prime Movers Lab (where Robbins is a partner), with participation from speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno, boxer Deontay Wilder, and Designer Fund. After Prime Movers invested, Robbins began chatting with Whitmer and co-founder Tyler Sheaffer on small stuff like branding, but as his enthusiasm and ideas for the app grew, they offered to bring him in as a co-founder. The author has since helped shape The Path into a therapy-plus-coaching app that taps into Robbins’ popular self-improvements methods. Whitmer, formerly an early employee at meditation app Calm alongside Sheaffer, says his pursuit of mental health tech was born out of tragic experiences: When he was 19, a beloved uncle committed suicide. That inspired Whitmar to get a PhD in psychology, and he planned to go into research after graduation. But while he was in college, a cousin left a voicemail. “I didn’t realize until it was too late. It was also a call for help, and he killed himself,” Whitmar recalls. That spurred a change of course towards work that could bring science’s findings to the masses. Working at Calm was a natural first step, as the research on how meditation improves mental health is solid. Still, after working at Calm until 2021, Whitmar felt he could do more. “Even though we did have a big impact, it’s not really a big enough impact,” he said. “The issue is, people’s problems are just too idiosyncratic. They’re too personal. They’re unique.” Plus, everyone will never have access to individual therapy or coaching. There just aren’t enough therapists in the world for that. The Path, co-founder and CEO Anson WhitmerImage Credits:The Path Whitmar sees LLMs and AI as the bridge spanning that gap. “What’s exciting and game-changing is that, for the first time in my career, I’ve seen that there’s actually this possibility for every single person to have the personalized sort of access and care that they need to really get the help,” he said. In fact, such a thing is already starting to happen. OpenAI has said that at least 900 people use ChatGPT for mental health-related queries every week. However, the problem with using consumer chatbots for mental health is that they are “optimized for engagement,” Whitmer says, and that is the opposite of what therapy and coaching should do. Consumer chatbots try to solve problems quickly for users, and also engage in “reinforcement” of ideas, to keep users coming back for more. “But therapy/coaching doesn’t work that way. You’re trying to understand the problem deeply,” he said. The idea is to dig out assumptions and then help the person discover their own solutions. Whitmar says The Path’s AI is trained “to set up structure, so that later on, you can get to a place where there is resolution,” but from a place of understanding. To that end, Whitmar says the startup’s specially trained AI model has scored a 95 on the mental health safety AI benchmark, Vera-MH. This compares to a top score of 65 for the consumer bots. “It’s meant to challenge you. It’s not just meant to agree with you,” he says. In fact, he says the app’s model is post-trained from open source models, so it doesn’t use the major consumer LLMs at all, meaning it is not simply a wrapper over them. The Path, which lets users choose from 11 virtual AI therapists and customize their preferences for directness and other details, is currently free as it gains users. Eventually, the startup plans to charge $40 a month. When you p
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