We’re looking for an investment partner.
RivalUP is a streaming social competition platform, built deliberately outside the gambling perimeter and deliberately saying so. No user deposits, holds or withdraws money — not as a future toggle we are hiding, but as the architecture. We are raising to fund the first phase, and we are having those conversations now.
TikTok has the attention but nothing on the line. Betting apps have the consequence but nothing to watch, and a licence to pay for. RivalUP puts something real on the line without ever touching a user’s money — and the video that proves it is the product.
The shape of the company, the decisions behind it, and the things we would rather tell you than have you discover. It is deliberately not a term sheet.
Round size, structure, the cost model, the growth model and the plan are shared directly with people we are talking to — not published on a web page.
Tell us who you are through the form at the bottom. We reply within two working days with the full concept document and a time.
Four failures, three mistakes.
The most credible peer-to-peer social competition company in the space was absorbed into a parent that filed for Chapter 11 in July 2026 and began winding down US operations. The field is vacated, and it was vacated for reasons worth reading.
Consequence without a story
A transaction is not shareable. Nobody sends a friend a screenshot of a settled slip, so there is no organic distribution and every single user has to be bought — on a thin cut of small peer transactions that could never fund acquisition.
Story without consequence
The habit and accountability products kept the human narrative and removed all consequence, asking the user to supply the motivation the product was supposed to provide. Retention collapses at the first friction point.
Targeting nobody in particular
Positioned broadly, they landed between two audiences and served neither. Serious money went elsewhere; mainstream social users found them cold and transactional and stayed on TikTok.
Our reading of the evidence. The category failed because it was built as betting with a social veneer. It should have been built as social entertainment with a consequence layer. That distinction determines the feed, the onboarding, the cost base and whether the company needs a licence to exist.
Six choices that follow from removing the money.
| Design choice | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| The user is the performer, not the spectator | Outcomes are produced by our users on camera, not by a football match. This is what generates content, and what makes RivalUP a creator product rather than a wagering one. |
| Content is a by-product of settlement | Every settled challenge yields a clip automatically. Content supply scales with participation, at zero marginal content cost. |
| Consequence without currency | Forfeits, the Rival Record, streaks, sponsor-funded prizes, charity commitments and Ups deliver the bite habit apps lack, without the cost and risk a licensed model carries. |
| No wallet in the funnel | No identity check and no deposit between watching a clip and joining a challenge. We expect this to be the single largest driver of our conversion advantage over any competitor whose funnel has one. |
| Proof is a product, not a policy | A tiered Proof Standard with live verification where valuable prizes are decided. Nobody else in this space has built it. |
| Reputation that only exists here | The Rival Record accrues on-platform and is worthless off it. In a model with no money in it, this is the primary store of value and the main switching cost. The demo walks through it. |
Outside the perimeter by construction.
Gambling regulation turns on prize, chance and consideration. Remove any one and the activity generally falls outside the perimeter. RivalUP removes consideration entirely: entry is free everywhere, no user funds another user’s prize, outcomes are determined by what a participant does on camera inside a stated window, and the platform’s own currency can never be bought or redeemed.
With no consideration and no chance, there is nothing to classify. The absence of a licence is the product of a specific, defensible set of design choices — not a gap waiting to be filled.
One compliance area grows rather than shrinks: free-entry skill competitions are regulated as prize promotions in most developed markets — advertising and consumer-protection law, not gambling law. Charitable-solicitation rules apply to the charity flow. Both are smaller and more tractable surfaces than gambling licensing, and both are first-phase items.
Four bright lines, enforced in code
- Ups are never purchasable, and never redeemable for cash, credit, or entry into anything of monetary value.
- Prize outcomes are always skill-determined. A sponsored draw among participants is a lottery; every prize here is won by performing.
- No user may ever fund a prize another user can win.
- The charity commitment flow has exactly one payee: a registered charity.
Reviewed at every release against shipping features, not held as a policy document nobody checks.
Seven lines. No single counterparty class can switch the company off.
Four are recurring or self-scaling with usage; three require sales effort. Workplace and club licensing carries the first year, because it is sold rather than grown and does not need consumer scale to exist.
| Line | Who pays, and for what | Phase |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate wellness & club/school licensing | Employers, gyms, clubs and universities buy a managed challenge programme for their members, per seat, with an admin console and no advertising. | 1 |
| Charity forfeit processing | A small, fully disclosed fee on voluntary charity commitments, covering payment processing and platform cost. Nothing is taken if the challenge is won. | 1 |
| Sponsored prize pools | Brands fund a real prize on a free-to-enter challenge and buy verified participation with a measurable completion rate, rather than impressions. | 2 |
| Creator gifting | Viewers reward performers during live challenges. Standard platform share, no behaviour change required of anyone. | 2 |
| RivalUP Pro | Consumer subscription: group tools, advanced stats, HD clip export, no advertising. No discount on anything that decides an outcome. | 2 |
| In-feed advertising | Standard vertical video inventory in the public Arena feed, once there is an audience worth selling. | 2–3 |
| Guardian family | A supervised family plan for 13–17s on a separate, closed-loop currency, opened only once the safety infrastructure is proven. | 4 |
Pricing, the bottom-up revenue build and the cost model behind them are part of the conversation, not this page.
The hardest problem in the plan, named rather than buried.
When we costed infrastructure against usage for the first time, one problem stood out ahead of everything else in the concept. It is not flattering, and we would rather tell you than have you find it yourself in the second meeting.
This business is gross-margin negative below real scale, and reaches only a fraction of what a typical consumer social company earns at the scale we can currently model. The cause is specific and traceable: this version makes live the centre of the product. Gifting is live-only, Dares are live, the Arena runs a scheduled live slate, and real-time stream moderation is the single largest new line in the cost base.
Tier moderation to usage
Full real-time coverage only where gifting is switched on or viewership crosses a threshold; sampled and automated-first below it. This alone should roughly halve the largest infrastructure line at scale.
Attach live cost to live revenue
Gate the heaviest live features behind Pro or an active gifting session, cap concurrent free viewers on unmonetised streams, tighten the quality ladder for viewers not paying in some form.
Treat ARPU as under pressure
At current infrastructure cost per user, a “conservative” ARPU is the assumption that breaks the model. Raising it is a scheduled second-phase objective, not a hoped-for surprise.
The honest summary: more capital does not fix this on its own. It buys the time to fix it with product decisions, which is what the roadmap spends that time doing. The full cost model, the numbers behind it and the schedule for each lever are in the concept document.
Three markets, three different jobs.
The proving ground
Not chosen for acquisition efficiency. Chosen for signal quality on the retention read — same-timezone support through the riskiest weeks, cultural fluency to catch product problems fast, and existing local networks for the first workplace and club accounts. Low volume is the point.
The volume and content engine
A young, overwhelmingly short-video-native population with high social penetration and a strong cultural familiarity with competitive challenge. The 2026 payment crackdown targets carrier-billing routes used by unlicensed operators specifically, not general app payments — but a real compliance and payments check, not an assumption, precedes any scaled spend here.
Second engine, bridge to brand revenue
A large short-video audience and, unlike Kazakhstan, a genuine advertiser market as well. Lira volatility argues for pricing in EUR; the country’s history of platform-level restrictions is carried as a tail risk in the register rather than assumed away.
Wider Central Asia is a natural, cheap extension of the same playbook — but the short-video culture there is not yet deep enough to seed a content flywheel into. It is a later addition, not a silent drop.
One product, one track.
iOS and Android. Private groups, Forfeit Mode, the Rival Record, Ups, charity commitments, Tier 1–2 proof, the vertical feed, clip export, the workplace console. Pro subscription billing is deliberately cut from this phase and ships as a fast-follow — it is the smallest first-year line, and the schedule does not fit otherwise.
Clears when: friend groups that used RivalUP with nothing but a forfeit and a leaderboard on the line come back — a real thirty-day group retention read, repeat challenge volume per active group, and live workplace accounts paying for the console.
Public Arena, Tier 3 Live Verified proof, live streaming at scale, creator gifting, the Dare format behind pre-moderation, first sponsored prize pools, advertising inventory, Pro billing, and the three margin levers above.
Clears when: strangers compete in the Arena and viewers gift them for it; live cost per viewer-hour trends down; the first brand campaigns are delivered; the gross margin trend turns.
Sponsored prize pools at the larger tiers, direct ad sales, expansion into wider EU, UK and Gulf markets, creator programme at scale.
Clears when: blended ARPU is on the right trajectory, no single revenue line dominates, and gross margin approaches consumer social norms.
Guardian mode for supervised under-18 accounts, couples and household formats, schools and institutions, partner API, further markets.
Clears when: Guardian launches with zero safeguarding incidents and the institutional pipeline is real.
The phase we are raising for, its length, its cost and the specific numeric targets attached to each gate are shared directly.
What makes this worth a conversation.
An unoccupied category, at the moment the enabling proof technology matured and the leading incumbent left the field.
A content engine that is a by-product of the core loop rather than a cost centre bolted onto it.
No licensing dependency, no payment-processor single point of failure, and no market closed to us on day one.
Seven revenue lines, none allowed to dominate at maturity, two of which require no sales effort at all.
A funnel with no wallet in it — the specific, measurable reason we expect several times the participation rate of any competitor whose funnel has one.
A make-or-break question that gets answered early and cheaply, before most of the capital is committed — and a raise structured so a partner can buy that answer rather than take it on faith.
A named, quantified margin problem with a named, scheduled fix — rather than a margin story that survives only until someone builds a real cost model.
An option on a licensed, cash-settled version of the product, preserved in the architecture at zero carrying cost and deliberately not exercised.
Thirty minutes and the full concept.
The complete product concept document runs to more than forty pages: the full cost model, the growth model, the risk register, the hiring sequence, the brand lexicon, the decision log and the deferred cash option.
Round size, structure, the plan and every number behind it are shared in that conversation rather than on a public page — tell us who you are and we will send the document and a time.
Founder biographies are not in the document and are not fabricated to fill the gap — they belong in front of you in person. Ask, and we will bring them to the call.