The B2B platform turning loyalty programs into live competitions - dropped into brands' own apps through a single white-label SDK.
Lucra's lightning-bolt mark. The New York company was founded in 2019 by Goldman Sachs alumni Dylan Robbins and Michael Madding, and now powers gamified play for the likes of Dave & Buster's and Five Iron Golf.
For two decades, the customer-loyalty industry has been perfecting the same idea: reward people with points for purchases they were going to make anyway. Lucra, a 40-person company headquartered in New York, is built on the argument that the idea was wrong from the start. Its pitch, printed plainly across its own website, is blunt - "Points don't create loyalty. Playing for something does."
Lucra sells that conviction as software. Its core product is a white-label SDK - a native software development kit that a brand can embed directly into an existing mobile app or website - that lets that brand run live social competitions for its own customers. Tournaments, head-to-head challenges, mini-games: free-to-play, for rewards, or, where regulation allows, for real money. The customer experience feels like a game. The business underneath it is engagement infrastructure.
That combination has attracted an unusual roster of backers. In April 2026, Lucra raised a $20 million Series B led by the venture arm of ARK Invest, Cathie Wood's firm - the first time ARK's venture fund had ever led an early-stage round. The detail that drew the most attention: the deal had nothing to do with artificial intelligence, the category almost every other venture dollar was chasing that year.
Lucra did not start here. When Robbins and Madding - who met while working at Goldman Sachs and shared a habit of making friendly wagers on sports and games - founded the company in 2019, it was a consumer product. Lucra was a peer-to-peer, real-money sports gaming app that let fans set their own terms and challenge friends directly on player performances. By 2021 it had launched an iOS app across 37 U.S. states.
The consumer version worked, but the founders concluded the larger, more durable opportunity was to stop competing for players' attention and instead sell the machinery to the brands that already had it. So Lucra flipped its model: rather than run its own destination app, it packaged its competition engine as an SDK that any consumer brand could install.
That pivot is central to why sophisticated investors gave the company a second look. ARK's Nick Grous drew an explicit contrast with Skillz, the consumer game-licensing company that burned many investors: "It didn't work out well for us and many other investors," he said, before framing Lucra's edge as being "a B2B platform, selling interactive esports as a loyalty program" rather than licensing games directly to consumers.
The result is a product that behaves like plumbing. A golf chain, an arcade operator and a jukebox network can each embed the same underlying engine and present entirely different, branded experiences to their own customers - without building competitive infrastructure, payments or compliance from scratch.
The loyalty industry has been optimizing for the wrong thing. It has been trying to reward transactions.— Lucra
Lucra's platform breaks into a handful of building blocks. A brand can use one or stack them together inside its existing product.
A native, white-label kit that embeds the full competition and gamification engine directly into a brand's app or website.
Branded competitive events that run free-to-play, for rewards, or for real money - customers compete for prizes inside the brand's ecosystem.
Direct challenges where users set their own terms and compete against friends or other customers.
Lightweight, embeddable games designed to drive repeat visits and daily habit inside client apps.
Merchant-of-record infrastructure handling KYC/AML, fraud monitoring, payments and state-by-state regulatory coverage for real-money play.
The last block is easy to overlook and hard to replicate. Running real-money contests means clearing identity checks, anti-money-laundering rules, fraud monitoring and a patchwork of state regulations. Lucra swallows all of it and operates as the merchant of record, so a brand can offer real stakes without ever building - or being liable for - the regulatory stack. For most companies, that plumbing is exactly where a real-money idea would otherwise die.
Consumer brands in hospitality, entertainment, sports and fitness fight the same battle: how to make customers come back without buying loyalty with discounts. Points programs are expensive, easy to ignore and rarely change behavior.
Lucra reframes retention as a game. Instead of a balance nobody redeems with joy, customers get standings, stakes and a shot at winning - and, crucially, 94% of the money wagered stays inside the brand's own ecosystem rather than leaking out.
The clearest way to place Lucra is against the alternatives a brand would otherwise consider. Consumer game publishers like Skillz license games straight to players and own the relationship. Traditional loyalty vendors reward transactions with points. Lucra sits underneath a brand's existing product and hands the customer relationship - and the retained spend - back to the brand.
Figures are company-reported and describe specific client outcomes; they are not audited market statistics.
Lucra is a B2B / B2B2C software business. It licenses its SDK and gamification engine to consumer brands as an engagement and loyalty layer, and acts as merchant of record for real-money contests - earning through platform fees and a share of activity while keeping the bulk of wagered money inside each client's walls.
Third-party estimates put annual revenue around $1.5M - a figure consistent with an early-stage company that has only recently shifted its full weight behind the B2B model and closed the capital to scale it.
The Series B has a good origin story. As Robbins tells it, ARK first entered the picture through a chance meeting at a dartboard in a New York bar; when the two men ran into each other again six months later, a conversation about what each did for work led to an introduction to ARK's investment team - and a small check in Lucra's Series A. By the Series B, ARK was ready to lead.
Dylan Robbins and Michael Madding, who met at Goldman Sachs, launch Lucra to bring friendly wagering between friends online.
Lucra launches its peer-to-peer, real-money sports gaming iOS app across 37 U.S. states.
Lucra repositions from a consumer app to selling its competition engine as an embeddable SDK for brands.
Backers including 7GC, ARK Invest, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Steve Kuhn fund the push into brand loyalty.
ARK's venture fund leads its first-ever early-stage round, alongside Alumni Ventures, Astralis Capital, Harlo Equity Partners, Simplex Ventures, SeventySix Capital and WTI.
No matter how many times we went at him, his conviction - there was just no let up.— Cathie Wood, ARK Invest, on founder Dylan Robbins
Lucra occupies a seam that the market has not fully named. It is not a game studio, not a sportsbook, and not a conventional rewards vendor. It is competitive-play infrastructure - a layer that sits inside consumer software wherever a brand wants engagement it can measure.
That positioning is also a hedge against the moment it raised into. In late 2025, with venture capital fixated on AI, Robbins reportedly rebuilt his pitch to address the trend head-on rather than dodge it: if AI genuinely gives people back their time, he argued, they will spend more of it playing games with friends - at the bar or online. Same company, different doorway.
Whether the thesis holds will show up in the numbers over the next few years: how many brands embed the SDK, how much wagering stays in-ecosystem, and whether "playing for something" proves stickier than points at scale. For now, Lucra has the clients, the capital and a model that a firm known for high-conviction bets was willing to lead for the first time.
Lucra provides a white-label SDK that lets brands run live social competitions - tournaments, head-to-head challenges and mini-games - inside their own apps and websites as a modern loyalty and engagement layer.
Lucra was founded in 2019 by Dylan Robbins (CEO) and Michael Madding, who met while working at Goldman Sachs.
Consumer brands in hospitality, entertainment, sports and fitness, including Dave & Buster's, Five Iron Golf, TouchTunes and ChessKings.
Roughly $41.6M in total, including a $10M raise in December 2024 and a $20M Series B led by ARK Invest's venture fund in April 2026.
Instead of rewarding transactions with points, Lucra gives customers something to compete for - real or reward-based stakes - and handles compliance, payments and fraud as merchant of record.
Profile compiled from public sources, July 2026. Figures such as retention lift, in-ecosystem share and revenue are company-reported or third-party estimates and are noted as approximate where relevant.