{"id":602817,"date":"2026-04-24T02:57:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T02:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/602817\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T02:57:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T02:57:12","slug":"cathie-woods-ark-makes-its-first-lead-investment-in-startup-lucra-and-it-isnt-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/602817\/","title":{"rendered":"Cathie Wood\u2019s ARK makes its first lead investment in startup Lucra \u2014 and it isn\u2019t AI\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

ARK Invest Venture Fund has made its first-ever lead investment in an early-stage startup called Lucra,<\/a> firm founder Cathie Wood told TechCrunch.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe feel pretty excited about it,\u201d Wood (pictured above) said in the recent interview regarding the investment in the startup.<\/p>\n

Lucra developed a software platform that reimagines corporate loyalty programs into interactive, esports-like events such as tournaments where customers can play each other, even betting or winning cash or company giveaways. The startup said its customers include Five Iron Golf, Chess Kings, and Dave & Buster\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Lucra announced on Wednesday that it raised a $20 million Series B, led by the ARK fund, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Astralis Capital, Harlo Equity Partners, Simplex Ventures, SeventySix Capital, and WTI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are a few reasons why the famed financial company has never led a startup deal before. For one, the ARK Invest Venture Fund is not a typical VC fund. It\u2019s an SEC-regulated interval fund (also known as a closed-end mutual fund), meaning anyone can invest in it, for as little as $500. However, it is not traded on a public exchange, so investors cannot sell shares at will. They can sell limited shares on specific dates, quarterly.<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wood also noted that the person running the fund, director of research Nick Grous, \u201cis a tough sell,\u201d leaving startups with the difficult task of getting him excited enough to advocate to lead a deal.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s even wilder is that ARK was particularly gun-shy about this sort of business because it got burned after investing in a somewhat similar company a few years ago.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had actually owned a company called Skillz, which kind of operated in this space,\u201d Grous said. \u201cIt didn\u2019t work out well for us and many other investors.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Skillz was a once-hot public company that later became mired in<\/a> troubles and lawsuits<\/a>.\u00a0The big difference, the investor said, is that Lucra is a B2B platform, selling interactive esports as a loyalty program, rather than trying to license and run games directly to consumers.<\/p>\n

\u201cOvercoming our initial hurdle, especially given our experience with Skillz, overcoming our reticence, having Nick overcome it, that was our first screen,\u201d Wood said of how this startup convinced her company to write a big check.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this case, ARK Invest had participated in Lucra\u2019s previous Series A round, and had grown familiar with its business model, its trajectory, and its founder and CEO Dylan Robbins, Grous told TechCrunch.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had been in constant communication,\u201d Grous said, adding that his venture-esq fund attempts to have quarterly conference calls with the startups in the portfolio, similar to how public companies report to investors quarterly. ARK mostly works in the public market, offering a slate of publicly traded EFT funds.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ARKNick GrousImage Credits:ARK Invest<\/p>\n

Despite already being in the portfolio, Lucra\u2019s founder was grilled numerous times when it came time to buy more shares \u2014 first by Grous and then ARK\u2019s investment committee, both he and Wood described.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During those calls, Robbins \u201chad thought about all the things that went wrong\u201d with similar companies like Skillz, as well as with Lucra, and had answers, Wood said. \u201cNo matter how many times we went at him, his conviction, there was just no let up,\u201d she described.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It also helped that this company\u2019s financials were promising, it was in an area that ARK knew well, and this was not AI, aka the most hyped, most expensive area these days.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been underwriting the sports-betting space, understanding the gamification aspects of entertainment,\u201d Grous said, meaning that the investment firm could \u201creally understand the opportunity here.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The ARK Invest Venture Fund holds<\/a> shares of companies like Epic Games, Kalshi, and Discord, for instance. It also holds OpenAI, Anthropic, Replit, Grok, and Perplexity, so it knows the AI scene well.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are all over AI, just like everyone else, because it is a massive revolution,\u201d Wood explained.\u00a0\u201cBut in the process, a lot of companies are being neglected.\u201d This means that spotting such potentially neglected companies is \u201cour opportunity because we are doing research in many other areas than AI,\u201d\u00a0she said.<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ARK Invest Venture Fund has made its first-ever lead investment in an early-stage startup called Lucra, firm founder…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":602818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[262291,28,158,86769,186,62604],"class_list":{"0":"post-602817","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-ark-invest","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-entrepreneurship","11":"tag-esports","12":"tag-exclusive","13":"tag-loyalty-rewards"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/602818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}