A Liverpool gaming tech start-up founded by a 21-year-old computer science graduate has raised £300,000 in a pre-seed funding round, taking its total backing to more than £350,000.
SkinScanner.gg, co-founded by Liverpool John Moores University graduate Joshua Sinclair and Nathan Engolodoe, has developed a price comparison platform for tradable assets in Counter-Strike 2 (CS2).
The latest round includes backing from Baltic Ventures and Graeme Ankers, co-founder and former managing director of Liverpool games studio Firesprite, which was acquired by Sony in 2021.
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Craig Osborne, Jennifer Houghton MBE and the Baltic Ventures Angel Syndicate have also invested.
SkinScanner.gg operates as a free comparison site aggregating live prices from 24 marketplaces where players buy and sell CS2 “skins” – cosmetic items which change the appearance of weapons in the game and can be traded for real money.
The business says it now has more than 40,000 monthly active users and a Discord community of more than 23,000 members, while referring more than £3m in monthly traffic to CS2 marketplaces. It has partnerships with 10 marketplaces.
Sinclair moved to Liverpool to study computer science at LJMU and graduated with First-Class Honours earlier this year.
He began pitching SkinScanner.gg to Liverpool accelerator Baltic Ventures while completing his final-year dissertation, securing an initial £30,000 investment from the organisation in July 2025.
Sinclair and Engolodoe subsequently raised another £20,000 from angel investors before completing the latest £300,000 round.
Through the Baltic Ventures accelerator, Sinclair connected with Ankers, who became a mentor to the team and has now joined the latest round as a strategic lead investor.
Liverpool has a long-established games development sector, with studios founded in the city including Bizarre Creations, Firesprite and Lucid Games going on to be acquired by Activision, Sony and Tencent-owned LightSpeed Studios respectively.
Counter-Strike 2, developed by Valve and launched in 2023, has also developed a substantial economy around its tradable cosmetic items, with skins bought and sold across a range of third-party marketplaces.
Sinclair said: “We were deliberate about bringing the right investors into the business. This round gives us access to the capital, experience and networks that can help us become the leading discovery platform in the multi-billion-pound global Counter-Strike skins market.”
