Collaborative Fund, the 15-year-old, New York-based generalist venture firm with roughly EUR 654 million under management, is taking a stake in the football club D.C. United and its stadium, Audi Field. The firm, known for early bets on Lyft, Reddit, Sweetgreen and Olipop, becomes the latest and smallest venture player to turn investment capital into professional sports ownership.
The move follows a path opened by Thrive Capital only months earlier. Joshua Kushner’s Thrive launched a new vehicle, Thrive Eternal, built explicitly to hold “iconic franchises and cultural institutions” for decades, funded by many of the same investors already in Thrive’s venture and growth funds. The firm began by announcing a stake in the San Francisco Giants. Months later, the same vehicle, with former Disney chief executive Bob Iger joining as co-owner, bought the Lakers outright for a record £9.5 billion.
How Venture Money Differs from Established Sports Investing
Historically, money has flowed into professional sports through two other channels: individual tech fortunes and private equity. Vinod Khosla and his family agreed this summer to buy the Seattle Seahawks for a record £7.3 billion, shortly after the Khosla family also took a stake in the San Francisco 49ers alongside OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor. That reflected a personal-wealth approach seen repeatedly across the sector.
Private equity firms have been active 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 £380 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 holds minority positions across MLB, the NFL, the NBA and European football. Apollo, the newest entrant, has mostly focused on sports financing deals rather than ownership stakes.
A Different Structure for the D.C. United Deal
Thrive and Collaborative are pursuing neither the personal-wealth nor the private-equity route, and their approaches to sports ownership differ sharply. 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 cheques, treating the deal less as a buy-and-hold asset and more as infrastructure.
In a memo, Collaborative Fund founder and managing partner Craig Shapiro framed the deal as an extension of the firm’s existing work. “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.
Shapiro pointed to tailwinds around American football specifically, including a recent World Cup, the forthcoming Los Angeles Olympics and rising youth participation numbers in the United States. He also cited D.C. United’s ownership of Audi Field in Washington, D.C., a
