The Collaborative Fund DC United deal, announced this week, is the latest sign that venture capital is carving out its own lane in professional sports ownership, one that looks nothing like the private equity model and nothing like a tech billionaire’s vanity purchase.
Collaborative Fund, the New York-based generalist venture firm with roughly $1 billion under management and early bets on Lyft, Reddit, Sweetgreen, and Olipop, is taking a minority stake in D.C. United and its home ground, Audi Field. The deal is still subject to Major League Soccer approval.
How Collaborative Fund’s DC United Bet Was Framed
In a memo shared ahead of a TechCrunch event, Collaborative Fund founder and managing partner Craig Shapiro described the investment not as an asset play but as an extension of the firm’s existing thesis. ‘A franchise is the ultimate consumer product,’ he wrote.
The logic runs like this: D.C. United is one of MLS’s founding clubs, with a decades-long fan base and a set of structural advantages that go well beyond match-day revenue. The club owns Audi Field outright, a 20,000-seat venue that opened in 2018 and was named one of Washington’s top real estate deals of that year. According to SportsPro, the club also has a mixed-use development partnership with Hoffman & Associates adjacent to the stadium, set to include 455 apartment residences alongside retail and entertainment facilities.
Shapiro’s pitch to investors is that all of this adds up to something a seed-stage software investment rarely offers: predictable, recurring foot traffic. Tens of thousands of people arrive on a schedule. Collaborative sees that as a distribution channel for its portfolio companies, imagining Whoop wearable activations for fans, or Olipop drinks in game-day concessions.
The stadium economics have their own pull. Forbes calculated D.C. United’s enterprise value at $785 million as of May 2025, with the club generating $90 million in revenue during the 2024–25 season. That valuation incorporates ownership of Audi Field and the surrounding real estate. Front Office Sports reported that the club carries $150 million in debt, and that a minority investment by NFL running back Mark Ingram II last year implied a $710 million club valuation at that time.
The trajectory from a distance: SportsPro notes the club was valued at around $60 million when Jason Levien invested as managing general owner in 2012. MLS’s average club value is up roughly 134% since 2019.
Thrive Capital Set the Template, but the Structures Diverge
The firm that opened this particular door is Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital, which now manages more than $50 billion in assets according to a regulatory filing cited by Bloomberg. Thrive launched a dedicated vehicle, Thrive Eternal, in April, explicitly built to hold what it called ‘iconic franchises and cultural institutions’ in perpetuity. Its first move was a sub-10% stake in MLB’s San Francisco Giants.
Months later, Thrive Eternal, with former Disney CEO Bob Iger joining as co-owner, bought the Los Angeles Lakers for a record $12.5 billion. The ambition embedded in the deal is quantifiable: according to a leaked investor pitch deck reported by the Los Angeles Business Journal, Thrive Eternal’s executives project the Lakers franchise will generate $600 million in revenue by 2037 and reach a $30 billion valuation that same year. NBA rules cap investment-fund ownership at 20%, per Newcomer, meaning Kushner and Iger will need to make substantial personal investments alongside the vehicle. Kushner also holds a minority piece of the Miami Heat that league conflict-of-interest rules will require him to sell before the Lakers transaction closes.
Collaborative’s approach is structurally different. There is no separate permanent-capital vehicle. The D.C. United stake is coming out of the same early-stage fund the firm uses for seed and Series A cheques. That framing matters: Thrive built an institution designed to hold trophy assets for generations; Collaborative is treating a soccer club the way it might treat a portfolio company with unusually durable distribution advantages.
Neither approach looks like private equity, which has been buying sports stakes for years through vehicles managed by Sixth Street, Ares, RedBird, and Arctos. And neither looks like the personal-wealth plays that have made headlines, such as Vinod Khosla’s family agreeing this summer to buy the Seattle Seahawks for $9.6 billion.
What Shapiro did not need to dwell on at Thursday’s investor event is the one thing that makes the pitch simple: D.C. United has won four domestic league championships, the club’s valuation stood at $35 million in 2008, and the asset that replaced it is now worth $785 million. With a World Cup already behind American soccer and the LA Olympics ahead of it, the next revaluation event has a date on the calendar.
