£300k · Pre-Seed · Gaming · Liverpool, UK
Liverpool-based Skinscanner.gg, a price-comparison platform for Counter-Strike 2 skins, has raised £300k in a Pre-Seed round. Graeme Ankers joined as strategic lead investor, alongside Craig Osborne, Jennifer Houghton MBE and the Baltic Ventures Angel Syndicate. The company said the round adds capital, operating experience and investor networks as it pursues a larger role in the global CS2 skins market.
The £300k is new financing. Earlier backing comprised £30k from Baltic Ventures’ accelerator and £20k from angel investors, taking cumulative funding above £350k. The company did not disclose a detailed allocation for the new capital.
A comparison layer for a fragmented skins market
CS2 skins trade across multiple third-party marketplaces, each with its own inventory, prices and transaction terms. Skinscanner.gg does not hold users’ items, Steam credentials or funds; it aggregates live listings and sends users to the selected marketplace to complete a trade. At the announcement, the free service compared prices across 24 marketplaces and showed information such as item condition, pattern and rarity.
That structure makes breadth and freshness commercially important. More marketplace coverage can improve the chance of surfacing a better price, while stronger user intent can make referred traffic more useful to marketplace partners. The company reported £3m-plus of monthly referred marketplace traffic and 10 partnerships at the time of the round. Its execution challenge is to keep comparisons current and trustworthy as coverage expands; a longer marketplace list has little value if listings or attributes are stale.
The company also reported more than 40,000 monthly active users and a Discord community above 23,000 members, both grown before this financing. That community gives Skinscanner.gg a direct channel to frequent traders who can test new comparison features and expose data gaps. It also concentrates the audience around a narrow use case rather than asking a general gaming audience to adopt a separate financial tool.
From accelerator backing to a specialist data product
Co-founders Joshua Sinclair and Nathan Engolodoe built Skinscanner.gg while Sinclair was completing a computer-science degree at Liverpool John Moores University. Baltic Ventures provided the initial accelerator funding in July 2025, and Ankers later moved from mentor to investor. The round therefore adds sector and company-building experience around a product that had already demonstrated user and referral volume; the next proof point is whether that support helps turn comparison activity into a durable marketplace-distribution position.
