Venture capital sports ownership has entered a new era. Thrive Capital opened the door just months ago, and Collaborative Fund has now pushed it wider open with a stake in D.C. United and Audi Field.
Collaborative Fund, the 15-year-old, New York-based generalist venture firm with roughly $1 billion under management, is taking a stake in the soccer club D.C. United and its stadium, Audi Field. The firm made early bets on Lyft, Reddit, Sweetgreen, and Olipop, among others.
It is the latest — and smallest — firm to try something that Thrive Capital pioneered: turning venture money into pro sports ownership.
How Thrive Capital Started the Trend
Joshua Kushner’s Thrive launched a new vehicle called Thrive Eternal, explicitly built to hold “iconic franchises and cultural institutions” for decades. It is funded by many of the same investors already in Thrive’s venture and growth funds.
The firm kicked things off by announcing a stake in the San Francisco Giants. Months later, the same vehicle — with former Disney CEO Bob Iger, a Thrive partner, joining as co-owner — bought the Lakers outright for a record $12.5 billion.
That approach is new. Historically, money has poured into pro sports two other ways: individual tech fortunes and private equity.
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 seen repeatedly over the years.
Private equity firms have also been at this for years. Sixth Street holds stakes in the Boston Celtics, the New England Patriots, and MLB’s San Francisco Giants. Ares owns a piece of the Miami Dolphins outright and separately financed Chelsea’s stadium plans through a $500 million preferred-equity deal. RedBird owns AC Milan outright and holds a minority stake in Fenway Sports Group, the holding company behind Liverpool and the Red Sox. Arctos has 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.
Collaborative Fund’s Different Approach
Thrive and Collaborative are doing neither of those things. At the same time, the two firms’ approaches to sports ownership look very different.
Thrive built a stand-alone, 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, treating the deal less like something to buy and hold and almost more like infrastructure.
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. “A franchise is the ultimate consumer product,” he wrote, arguing that D.C. United’s status as one of Major League Soccer’s original clubs gives Collaborative access to an institution with a decades-long fan base to build on.
The Strategic Thesis Behind the Deal
Shapiro pointed to the tailwinds around American soccer specifically: a World Cup just behind the sport, the LA Olympics ahead of it, and soaring youth participation numbers in the U.S. He also highlighted D.C.’s ownership of Audi Field in Washington, D.C., plus a talent-development pipeline through Loudoun County, Virginia, and rights to a future Baltimore expansion team.
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 — the sports team itself — 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.
As a backer of both fitness band maker Whoop and the beverage brand Olipop, Collaborative Fund is imagining a Whoop wearables activation for fans, or Olipop drinks woven into game-day concessions. Shapiro is thinking about the stadium’s foot traffic — tens of thousands of people showing up on a predictable schedule — as a distribution channel at a time when, because AI is making more of daily life feel synthetic, live experiences are becoming more valuable.
Why Sports Team Valuations Keep Climbing
Shapiro doesn’t dwell on this, but it surely helped sell Collaborative’s 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’s franchise value has roughly doubled in the two years since Lionel Messi arrived. MLS’s average club value is up roughly 134% since 2019. D.C. United’s 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.
If Shapiro is right that a franchise is also “the ultimate consumer product,” it could be a pretty good place to park money. Time will tell.
What This Means for Venture Capital Sports
The venture capital sports trend raises important questions about the future of team ownership. When venture firms use early-stage funds to buy stakes in sports teams, they are betting that the same playbook that built tech giants can work for cultural institutions.
For Collaborative Fund, the bet is on distribution and consumer engagement. A stadium full of fans is a captive audience. A portfolio company like Whoop or Olipop gets direct access to that audience in a way that traditional advertising cannot replicate.
For Thrive Capital, the bet is on permanence. Thrive Eternal is designed to hold assets for decades, not exit in five to seven years like a typical venture fund. That structure aligns with the long-term nature of sports ownership, where teams are often held by families for generations.
Risks and Open Questions
The deal is subject to MLS approval. That regulatory step is standard for any ownership change in the league, but it also signals that venture capital sports ownership still operates within traditional sports governance structures.
There are open questions about how fans will react to venture firms owning pieces of their teams. Sports teams are community assets, and supporters often have strong feelings about who owns them. A venture fund looking for portfolio synergies may not always align with fan interests.
There is also the question of what happens if a venture fund needs liquidity. Thrive Eternal’s permanent capital structure avoids that problem, but Collaborative’s use of an early-stage fund could create pressure to exit at some point.
Venture capital sports ownership is no longer a novelty. Thrive Capital proved the model could work at the highest level with the Lakers and the Giants. Collaborative Fund is now testing whether that model can scale down to a smaller market with a different strategic rationale.
Whether other venture firms follow will depend on how these deals perform. If Collaborative can turn Audi Field into a profitable showcase for its portfolio companies, the playbook could spread. If not, sports ownership may remain the domain of private equity and individual billionaires.
For now, the trend is clear: venture capital is no longer just funding startups. It is buying the cultural institutions that consumers love.
