It is insane where a simple game economy is heading.
Joshua Sinclair was still writing his thesis when he pitched for a place on Baltic Ventures, the early-stage accelerator in Liverpool's Baltic Triangle in 2025. It got him £30,000.
Following that, SkinScanner.gg has raised a £300,000 pre-seed round, pushing total funding past £350,000. Sinclair, now 21 and holding a First-Class computer science degree from Liverpool John Moores, runs the company with co-founder Nathan Engolodoe. Current backers are from Liverpool City Region and the Isle of Man.
SkinScanner basically pulls live listings from 24 marketplaces so traders can see where a given item is cheapest before they buy which is good for everyone. Float values, pattern indexes, rarity, all of it is in one place instead of across two dozen open tabs. The founders describe it as the Skyscanner for tradable in-game assets, which is a tidy pitch and pretty accurate.
The numbers, self-reported
According to release, the marketplace already has.
23,000-plus Discord members, grown organically
40,000-plus monthly active users
£3 million-plus in monthly referred traffic to CS2 marketplaces
10 partnerships with major marketplaces
£350,000-plus raised across the first 12 months
Who wrote the cheques
According to release, lead investors include the Baltic Ventures Angel Syndicate, Craig Osborne, Jennifer Houghton MBE, and Graeme Ankers, who co-founded Firesprite before Sony bought it in 2021. Ankers had already been mentoring the team, so the investment formalises an existing relationship.
Interestingly, Sinclair moved to Liverpool partly for the city's games heritage, and it's a reasonable draw: Bizarre Creations went to Activision in 2007, Firesprite to Sony in 2021, Lucid Games to Tencent's LightSpeed in 2023.
"We were deliberate about bringing the right investors into the business," Sinclair said. "This round gives us access to the capital, experience and networks that can help us become the leading discovery platform in the £7 billion Counter-Strike skins market."
The part the press release skips
CS2 skins are tradable, cash-convertible, and function in practice as speculative assets, which has made the surrounding ecosystem a regulatory target. Skin gambling sites have drawn cease-and-desist letters from Valve several times, litigation in multiple jurisdictions, and ongoing attention from gambling regulators in several countries.
SkinScanner itself sits outside the riskiest part of that cause it holds no skins, takes no Steam logins, handles no funds. Trades happen on the destination marketplace under that marketplace's terms. What it does is direct traffic, and where that traffic lands is governed by rules that keep shifting.
More:Razer Reveals New Counter-Strike 2 collection
Read
Source Editing
Visual Editing
Related news
