Collaborative Fund, the 15-year-old, New York-based generalist venture firm that has roughly $1 billion under management and that 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.
Itâs the latest â and smallest â firm to try something that Thrive Capital opened the door to just months ago: turning venture money into pro sports ownership.
To recap, Joshua Kushnerâs Thrive launched a new vehicle, Thrive Eternal, explicitly built to hold âiconic franchises and cultural institutionsâ for decades, funded by many of the same investors already in Thriveâs venture and growth funds. The firm kicked things off by announcing a stake in the San Francisco Giants. Months later, the same vehicle â with former Disney CEO Bob Iger, a Thrive partner, joining as co-owner â bought the Lakers outright for a record $12.5 billion.
Thatâs 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 weâve seen over and over.
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 MLBâs San Francisco Giants; Ares, which owns a piece of the Miami Dolphins outright and separately financed Chelseaâs 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.)
Thrive and Collaborative are doing neither of those things. At the same time, the two firmsâ 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, and 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. âA franchise is the ultimate consumer product,â he wrote, arguing that D.C. Unitedâs status as one of Major League Soccerâs original clubs gives Collaborative access to an institution with a decades-long fan base to build on.
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.âs 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.
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 â the sports team itself â 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, for example, Collaborative Fund is imagining a Whoop wearables activation for fans, or Olipop drinks woven into game-day concessions. Heâs thinking about the stadiumâs foot traffic â tens of thousands of people showing up on a predictable schedule â as a distribution channel at a time when, because AI is making more of daily life feel synthetic, live experiences are becoming more valuable.
Shapiro doesnât dwell on this, but it surely helped sell Collaborativeâs 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 Miamiâs franchise value has roughly doubled in the two years since Lionel Messi arrived, MLSâs average club value is up roughly 134% since 2019, and D.C. Unitedâs 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 âthe ultimate consumer product,â it could be a pretty good place to park money. Time will tell.
The deal is subject to MLS approval.
Topics
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesnât affect our editorial independence.
