Collaborative Fund, the 15-year-old New York-based generalist venture firm with roughly $1 billion under management that made early bets on Lyft, Reddit, Sweetgreen and Olipop, among others, is taking a stake in the DC United soccer club and its stadium, Audi Field.
It’s the latest (and smallest) company to attempt something Thrive Capital opened the door to just a few months ago: turning venture money into pro sports ownership.
In short, Joshua Kushner’s Thrive launched a new vehicle, Thrive Eternal, built explicitly to house “iconic franchises and cultural institutions” for decades, funded by many of the same investors already in Thrive’s venture and growth funds. The company began 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 a co-owner) purchased the Lakers for a record $12.5 billion.
That’s new. Historically, money has been invested in professional sports in two other ways: individual technology 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 shortly after the Khosla family also took a stake in the San Francisco 49ers along with OpenAI president Bret Taylor. That was a personal wealth play, the kind we’ve seen time and time again.
Private equity firms have also been at it for years, including Sixth Street, which has stakes in MLB’s Boston Celtics, New England Patriots and San Francisco Giants; Ares, who owns a full stake in the Miami Dolphins and separately funded Chelsea’s stadium plans through a $500 million preferred equity deal; RedBird, who wholly owns AC Milan and owns a minority stake in Fenway Sports Group, the holding company behind Liverpool and the Red Sox; and Arctos, with minority positions spread across the MLB, NFL, NBA and European soccer. (Apolo, the most recent entrant, has so far mostly limited itself to sports financing deals rather than ownership stakes.)
Thrive and Collaborative do none of those things. At the same time, the two companies’ approaches to sports ownership appear very different. Thrive built a permanent, independent capital vehicle specifically to hold trophy assets. Collaborative is investing with the same seed fund it uses to write seed and Series A checks, treating the deal less as 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 company already does. “A franchise is the ultimate consumer product,” he wrote, arguing that DC United’s status as one of Major League Soccer’s original clubs gives Collaborative access to an institution with a decades-long fan base on which to build.
He specifically pointed to the tailwinds around American soccer (a World Cup just behind the sport, the Los Angeles Olympics ahead, rising youth participation numbers in the U.S.), as well as DC’s ownership of Audi Field in Washington, D.C., plus a talent development channel through Loudoun County, Virginia, and rights to a future Baltimore expansion team.
In fact, the thesis Shapiro laid out at a TechCrunch StrictlyVC event Thursday night in New York has less to do with owning a piece of an appreciated asset—the sports team itself—and more to do with what the team makes possible. Collaborative wants to turn Audi Field into what it describes as a living showcase of its own portfolio.
As a sponsor of both sports band maker Whoop and beverage brand Olipop, for example, the Collaborative Fund is envisioning a WHOOP wearable device activation for fans, or Olipop beverages woven into game-day concessions. He’s thinking of stadium foot traffic — tens of thousands of people showing up at a predictable schedule — as a distribution channel at a time when, because AI is making daily life seem synthetic, live experiences are becoming more valuable.
Shapiro doesn’t dwell on this, but it surely helped convince Collaborative investors that the team’s valuations have skyrocketed, so the stake could pay off on its own. Soccer ratings in particular have been on the rise. The value of the Inter Miami franchise has roughly doubled in the two years since Lionel Messi arrived, the average value of MLS clubs is up to approximately 134% since 2019, and DC United’s own valuation has increased from $35 million in 2008 to $785 million today, taking into account its ownership of Audi Field and surrounding real estate.
If Shapiro is right that a franchise is also “the ultimate consumer product,” it could be a pretty good place to put money. Time will tell.
The agreement is subject to MLS approval.
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