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Collaborative Fund, the 15-year-old, New York-based generalist venture firm that has roughly $1 billion under management and which made early bets on Lyft, Reddit, Sweetgreen, and Olipop, among others, is taking a stake in the soccer club D.C. United and its stadium, Audi Field. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s the latest \u2014 and smallest \u2014 firm to try something that Thrive Capital opened the door to just months ago: turning venture money into pro sports ownership.<\/p>\n
To recap, Joshua Kushner\u2019s Thrive launched a new vehicle, Thrive Eternal, explicitly built to hold \u201ciconic franchises and cultural institutions\u201d for decades, funded by many of the same investors already in Thrive\u2019s venture and growth funds. The firm kicked things off by announcing a stake in the San Francisco Giants. Months later, the same vehicle \u2014 with former Disney CEO Bob Iger, a Thrive partner, joining as co-owner \u2014 bought the Lakers outright for a record $12.5 billion.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s new. Historically, money has poured into pro sports two other ways: individual tech fortunes, and private equity. For example, Vinod Khosla and his family agreed this summer to buy the Seattle Seahawks for a record $9.6 billion soon after the Khosla family also took a stake in the San Francisco 49ers alongside OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor. That was a personal-wealth play, the kind we\u2019ve seen over and over.<\/p>\n
Private equity firms have also been at this for years, including Sixth Street, which holds stakes in the Boston Celtics, the New England Patriots, and MLB\u2019s San Francisco Giants; Ares, which owns a piece of the Miami Dolphins outright and separately financed Chelsea\u2019s stadium plans through a $500 million preferred-equity deal; RedBird, which owns AC Milan outright and holds a minority stake in Fenway Sports Group, the holding company behind Liverpool and the Red Sox; and Arctos, with minority positions scattered across MLB, the NFL, the NBA, and European soccer. (Apollo, the newest entrant, has mostly stuck to sports financing deals so far rather than ownership stakes.)<\/p>\n
Thrive and Collaborative are doing neither of those things. At the same time, the two firms\u2019 approaches to sports ownership look very different. Thrive built a standalone, permanent-capital vehicle specifically to hold trophy assets. Collaborative is investing out of the same early-stage fund it uses to write seed and Series A checks, and treating the deal less like something to buy and hold and almost more like infrastructure.<\/p>\n
In a memo shared with TechCrunch, Collaborative Fund founder and managing partner Craig Shapiro framed the deal as an extension of what the firm already does. \u201cA franchise is the ultimate consumer product,\u201d he wrote, arguing that D.C. United\u2019s status as one of Major League Soccer\u2019s original clubs gives Collaborative access to an institution with a decades-long fan base to build on.<\/p>\n
He pointed to the tailwinds around American soccer specifically (a World Cup just behind the sport, the LA Olympics ahead of it, soaring youth participation numbers in the U.S.) as well as D.C.\u2019s ownership of Audi Field in Washington, D.C., plus a talent-development pipeline<\/a> through Loudoun County, Virginia, and rights to a future Baltimore expansion team.<\/p>\n Indeed, the thesis Shapiro laid out at a TechCrunch StrictlyVC event Thursday night in New York is less about owning a piece of an appreciating asset \u2013 the sports team itself \u2013 and more about what the team makes possible. Collaborative wants to turn Audi Field into what he describes as a living showcase for its own portfolio. <\/p>\n As a backer of both fitness band maker Whoop and the beverage brand Olipop, for example, Collaborative Fund is imagining a WHOOP wearables activation for fans, or Olipop drinks woven into game-day concessions. He\u2019s thinking about the stadium\u2019s foot traffic \u2014 tens of thousands of people showing up on a predictable schedule \u2014 as a distribution channel at a time when, because AI is making more of daily life feel synthetic, live experiences are becoming more valuable.<\/p>\n Shapiro doesn\u2019t dwell on this, but it surely helped sell Collaborative\u2019s investors that team valuations have been soaring, so the stake could pay off on its own. Soccer valuations in particular have been on a tear. Inter Miami\u2019s franchise value has roughly doubled in the two years since Lionel Messi arrived, MLS\u2019s average club value is up roughly 134%<\/a> since 2019, and D.C. United\u2019s own valuation has climbed from $35 million in 2008 to $785 million today, factoring in its ownership of Audi Field and the surrounding real estate. <\/p>\n If Shapiro is right that a franchise is also \u201cthe ultimate consumer product,\u201d it could be a pretty good place to park money. Time will tell.<\/p>\n The deal is subject to MLS approval.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n