Most real-money skill games ask players to compete alone and compare scores afterward. Topdog raised $2.5M in seed funding to move the category toward something that looks more like a live match.
The round was led by Boston Seed Capital, with participation from Raine Group, Bullpen, Versus VC, Spoondrift Capital, and Permit Ventures. It follows a $1.6M pre-seed from Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing Topdog's total raised to $4.1M. Topdog, the B2C brand under Toast, is backed by a roster of names from the modern betting industry, including FanDuel co-founder Nigel Eccles, Revenant VC founder Ryan Moore, and consultant Dustin Gouker.
Topdog builds synchronous, turn-based games where players compete directly against a live opponent rather than a house or a leaderboard. Its portfolio includes Basketball Hustle, a multiplayer game in which players draft teams and make decisions throughout a match, alongside 21 Hustle, Tilt and Pinfall. Underneath sits an end-to-end stack for matchmaking, player liquidity, payments, fraud detection and live operations—the hard part of making real-time play work at scale.
The thesis is that live play isn't just more engaging, it's more defensible, co-founder Aman Agarwal told BettingStartups. "The success of skill gaming hinges on players' perception of the fairness of the outcome," he said. "In asynchronous play, players rely on a score provided by the platform. In live play, they observe the opponent's movements. The game itself serves as the definitive proof of fairness." Agarwal said real-time titles also win where it counts: "Our data overwhelmingly shows they perform significantly better on retention and monetization too."
The numbers he shared point to a different engagement pattern, especially among younger users. Topdog players average roughly 25 games per day at about 60 seconds each, Agarwal said, against an industry norm he pegs at six games per day running four minutes apiece. "Younger players tend to want faster outcomes," he said. "They will play more games, but they want each one resolved quickly." Mature players, on the other hand, tend to value “depth and strategy,” Adarwal added.
That read on the audience is shaping what comes next. The new funding will go primarily toward user acquisition and a wider slate of sports games designed to keep fans competing outside the windows of live events. The titles are built, Agarwal said, "to preserve the familiarity of how fans experience a sport while using mechanics they already understand, rebuilt for how people actually play on a phone."
For Boston Seed's Peter Blacklow, who once led WorldWinner's skill-games business, the pull is execution on a problem that has stumped others. Topdog, he said, has "cracked several codes that we were unable to.”
We spoke with Aman and Toast co-founder Jatin Narang last year to hear how they were planning to fill a void with multiplayer skill games—catch the conversation here.
