Home TechnologyYou don’t need to be an AI startup to raise. Lucra has $20M to prove it.

You don’t need to be an AI startup to raise. Lucra has $20M to prove it.

TechnologyMay 21, 2026

1 min read

You don’t need to be an AI startup to raise. Lucra has $20M to prove it.

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 e

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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.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Source: TechCrunch

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You don’t need to be an AI startup to raise. Lucra has $20M to prove it.

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