real-money-gaming
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Dylan Robbins
Dylan Robbins is the founder and CEO of Lucra, a New York-based company that gives brands a white-label software kit for running peer-to-peer, real-money gaming and competitions inside their own apps. A former Goldman Sachs and AQR analyst with a Stanford MBA and a Duke undergraduate degree, Robbins started Lucra in 2019 with co-founder Michael Madding after the two spent years informally tracking sports wagers with friends. He pivoted the company from a consumer app to a B2B2C SDK in 2023, and in 2026 raised a $20M Series B led by ARK Invest - the fund's first lead investment in a non-AI startup.
Sean Ryan
Sean Ryan is the CEO and co-founder of ZOOT (GetZoot), a New York-based social sweepstakes gaming platform that swaps casino slots for arcade-style games like Plinko, Mines, Crash and Dice played for cash prizes. A 30-year gaming and digital-media operator, he built and led Facebook's multi-billion-dollar games business for 11 years, ran the digital music service Listen.com/Rhapsody, and co-founded social casino studio Open Wager (maker of LuckyLand Slots), which sold to VGW in 2017. In June 2025 he raised $6 million in seed funding led by CoinFund with Griffin Gaming Partners to turn ZOOT's US sweepstakes business into a global, stablecoin-powered gaming network.
Jake Brooks
Jake Brooks is the co-founder and co-CEO of Triumph, a San Francisco company that gives mobile game developers a drop-in SDK to add real-money, skill-based tournaments to their games. He dropped out of Stanford during the pandemic to build it, and in 2023 the company launched with $14.1M in seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst. Triumph handles the hard parts - payments, KYC, anti-fraud, matchmaking and state-by-state compliance - so developers can monetize beyond ads. Brooks pitches real-money competition as a third pillar of game revenue alongside advertising and in-app purchases.
Vickie Chen
Vickie Yanjuan Chen is the founder and CEO of Avia (AviaGames), the Silicon Valley company behind Pocket7Games - a real-money skill-based mobile gaming platform with 60M+ downloads, 450M+ monthly tournaments, and over $60M in venture funding. A 20-year gaming industry veteran who previously ran global publishing for Nasdaq-listed Changyou.com, Chen built Avia from a Mountain View garage with co-founder Ping Wang into a 400-person company that has paid out over $700M in cash prizes to players. Recognized by Forbes China as a 2022 Global Chinese Elite Top 100 Industry Leader, she is a vocal advocate for inclusive gaming and female leadership in tech.