Los Angeles has a habit of turning ideas into industries, and every once in a while a product shows up that understands the assignment before the room even finds a chair. Slips is one of those...
Los Angeles has a habit of turning ideas into industries, and every once in a while a product shows up that understands the assignment before the room even finds a chair. Slips is one of those products. A social-first, peer-to-peer betting platform built for people who would rather compete with each other than donate margin to a house, Slips just closed a $3.5M Series Seed. Not quietly. Not accidentally. And definitely not by chasing empty noise. This is what happens when product, timing, and restraint actually shake hands.
Founded in 2019 and launched publicly in 2021, Slips started with a deceptively simple question. What if betting felt more like competition and less like a toll booth? No house leaning on the scale. No hidden math working against you. Just users betting head to head, winner takes the pot, with Slips matching players instead of playing them. Since launch, the platform has grown past 150,000 registered users, paid out more than $6M in winnings, and posted over 500% YoY growth. That is not a vision slide. That is traction doing laps.
Founder and CEO Jess Richman has lived in the seams where brand, product, and infrastructure meet. Marketing, platforms, systems that scale only after they break a few times. Alongside him, CTO and Co-Founder Gurminder Singh has been laying the pipes. Peer-to-peer matching, real-money wallets, ACH payouts, and AI-generated prediction markets that spin up across sports, finance, politics, and culture. Not novelty AI. Operational AI. The kind that reduces friction and increases surface area at the same time.
The round was led by Las Olas Capital and Sunset Bay Capital, with participation from Andrew Schwartzberg, whose ownership stakes in the Charlotte Hornets and Leeds United make the sports angle more than theoretical. Add Jason Mercier, a six-time World Series of Poker champion, and suddenly probability, psychology, and competition are not buzzwords. They are lived experience. The market did not lean in because it was curious. It leaned in because the product already proved it could hold weight.
What makes Slips compelling is not just betting. It is the social gravity. Leaderboards, pools, tourlays, and prediction markets that feel closer to a group chat than a sportsbook. Add IRL experiences in bars, stadiums, private clubs, padel courts, pickleball runs, and golf weekends, and the platform starts behaving like infrastructure for competition, not just entertainment. The name fits. Money slips back and forth. Bragging rights come standard. The house stays out of it.
This capital goes into technology, team, and reach. Deeper infrastructure. More AI-scaled markets. Faster payouts. Broader state coverage. A product that keeps insisting betting can be competitive without being predatory. Slips is not chasing attention. It is compounding trust, one matched wager at a time, and letting the numbers do the talking.