skill-based-gaming
(4)
Players’ Lounge puts a price on your next game
It started with FIFA nights in bars. Now Players’ Lounge lets ordinary gamers wager on their own performance - and its latest expansion lets them trade on real sports, too.
Skillz and the price of a fair fight
Skillz turned the spare-minute mobile game into a contest with cash at stake. The harder contest has been building a business that can afford to keep people playing.
Splash Sports
Splash Sports is a Denver-based skill-based sports gaming platform that modernizes the office pool. Fans act as their own commissioners, creating and joining peer-to-peer real-money contests - Survivor, Pick'em, Tiers, and daily fantasy - across NFL, golf, and other sports. Built on the acquired RunYourPool and OfficeFootballPool audiences, Splash serves more than 2 million active users across 44 U.S. states and Canada, and in 2026 partnered with Polymarket to run the largest pro football survivor contest ever, with $21 million guaranteed.
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.