ARK Invest Venture Fund has made its first-ever lead investment in an early-stage startup called Lucra, firm founder Cathie Wood told TechCrunch.  

“We feel pretty excited about it,” Wood (pictured above) said in the recent interview regarding the investment in the startup.

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’s.

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. 

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’s 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.  

Wood also noted that the person running the fund, director of research Nick Grous, “is a tough sell,” leaving startups with the difficult task of getting him excited enough to advocate to lead a deal.

What’s 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.

“We had actually owned a company called Skillz, which kind of operated in this space,” Grous said. “It didn’t work out well for us and many other investors.” 

Skillz was a once-hot public company that later became mired in troubles and lawsuits. The 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.

“Overcoming our initial hurdle, especially given our experience with Skillz, overcoming our reticence, having Nick overcome it, that was our first screen,” Wood said of how this startup convinced her company to write a big check. 

In this case, ARK Invest had participated in Lucra’s previous Series A round, and had grown familiar with its business model, its trajectory, and its founder and CEO Dylan Robbins, Grous told TechCrunch.  

“We had been in constant communication,” 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.  

Despite already being in the portfolio, Lucra’s founder was grilled numerous times when it came time to buy more shares — first by Grous and then ARK’s investment committee, both he and Wood described. 

During those calls, Robbins “had thought about all the things that went wrong” with similar companies like Skillz, as well as with Lucra, and had answers, Wood said. “No matter how many times we went at him, his conviction, there was just no let up,” she described. 

It also helped that this company’s 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.

“We’ve been underwriting the sports-betting space, understanding the gamification aspects of entertainment,” Grous said, meaning that the investment firm could “really understand the opportunity here.” 

The ARK Invest Venture Fund holds 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.  

“We are all over AI, just like everyone else, because it is a massive revolution,” Wood explained. “But in the process, a lot of companies are being neglected.” This means that spotting such potentially neglected companies is “our opportunity because we are doing research in many other areas than AI,” she said.

Netherlands-based cosmetics giant Rituals has confirmed a data breach affecting customers’ personal information after hackers stole reams of data from its membership database.

The company disclosed the breach on Wednesday, according to an email sent to customers that TechCrunch has viewed and verified. 

Rituals said it identified an “unauthorized download” of members’ data in April that contained customers’ full name, date of birth, gender, postal and email address, and phone number, as well as their preferred Rituals store and account type.

When reached by TechCrunch, Rituals spokesperson Eline van Malssen said the hacker stole membership data about customers in Europe and the United Kingdom.

TechCrunch has learned that some customers notified by Rituals are based in the United States. The spokesperson confirmed the incident also affects some U.S. customers.

Rituals did not describe the nature of the cyberattack and the company said its investigation was underway to understand how the data breach happened. 

The cosmetics giant is the latest retailer to have customer membership data stolen in the past year, following a string of intrusions at U.K. grocery and shopping chain Co-op and Marks & Spencer, among others. Customer records can be attractive targets for hackers who steal the data and extort the company for a ransom in exchange for not publishing the information online.

When reached with questions about the incident, a Rituals spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company received any communication from the hackers, to share a more precise timeline of the breach, or to provide the exact number of affected members, citing unspecified “security reasons.”

According to its website, Rituals has over 41 million customers in its membership database. The retail giant made €2.4 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in revenue in 2025.