Spina lets you bet on your favorite childhood games—from Connect 4 to Tic-Tac-Toe

Jackson Erminio doesn’t carry your typical real-money gaming founder background. He came up through sneaker reselling, a failed e-commerce brand, and a marketing agency he built through college and sold last year. He describes his approach as "skill stacking"—each chapter adding a layer to improve the next. When he looked for where to put those layers to work, he landed on real-money gaming.

"I especially saw it over COVID and the years following," he said on The BettingStartups Podcast. "Everything was just betting on basically anything." The question for Erminio wasn't whether the category was growing, where a marketing-native founder with no gaming background could fit in a way that hadn't been done before.

The answer became Spina—a skill-based gaming platform built around live, player-versus-player matches in games people already know: Connect 4, 8-Ball, Tic-Tac-Toe. The pitch, as Erminio puts it, is "childhood games with adult stakes." Players are matchmade in real time, with an optional voice chat running through the game. The rake comes from a small fee per match—not from house edge.