We’re looking for an investment partner.
RivalUP turns everyday call-outs into watchable social competition. Friends challenge each other, raise the difficulty, prove the result on camera and carry every win, loss and rematch into a lasting rivalry. 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 make competition the product.
| 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. |
| One-tap participation | The jump from watching a clip to joining or cloning its challenge is immediate. We expect this to be the single largest driver of our conversion advantage. |
| 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 turns every result into lasting status, history and rivalry. It becomes more meaningful with every challenge and gives groups a reason to keep competing. 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.
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. Recent payment restrictions there target 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 the scale market, a genuine advertiser market as well. Local currency volatility argues for pricing in EUR; a history of platform-level restrictions is carried as a tail risk in the register rather than assumed away.
The wider region beyond these three 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 additional regions, 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 one-tap path from watching to competing — the specific, measurable reason we expect stronger participation than products built around passive viewing.
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.