VC Firms Are Now Buying Sports Teams — Collaborative Fund Joins Thrive's Playbook With a D.C. United Stake

Collaborative Fund, a 15-year-old, New York-based generalist venture firm with roughly $1 billion under management, is taking a stake in Major League Soccer's D.C. United and its stadium, Audi Field, according to TechCrunch. The firm has made its name on early consumer bets like Lyft, Reddit, Sweetgreen, and Olipop — not sports franchises.

It's the latest, and smallest, firm to follow a path that Thrive Capital opened up just months earlier: turning venture capital into direct pro sports ownership. Joshua Kushner's Thrive launched a dedicated vehicle, Thrive Eternal, explicitly built to hold "iconic franchises and cultural institutions" for decades, capitalized by many of the same limited partners already in Thrive's venture and growth funds.

Thrive Eternal's opening move was a stake in the San Francisco Giants. Months later, the same vehicle — with former Disney CEO Bob Iger joining as a co-owner alongside a Thrive partner — bought the Los Angeles Lakers outright for a record $12.5 billion, instantly becoming the largest sports franchise transaction in history and validating the model at the biggest possible scale.

Historically, capital has flowed into pro sports ownership through two channels: individual tech fortunes and institutional private equity. Vinod Khosla and his family agreed this summer to buy the Seattle Seahawks for a record $9.6 billion, months after the Khosla family also took a stake in the San Francisco 49ers alongside OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor — a personal-wealth play in the mold of Steve Ballmer or the Waltons.

PE firms, meanwhile, have taken the passive-minority route across MLB, NBA, NHL and now NFL teams through funds like Arctos, Ares, and Sixth Street, buying small non-controlling slices under league-approved programs rather than operating stakes. What Thrive and now Collaborative Fund are doing is structurally different from both models.

A venture fund buying into a sports franchise isn't just chasing appreciation on an illiquid, trophy asset — it's treating the team, and in Collaborative Fund's case specifically the stadium, as a platform. Audi Field becomes a live venue where portfolio companies can get real-world distribution, sponsorship placement, and brand exposure to a captive local audience, something no ordinary LP check into a growth-stage startup can offer.

That logic extends the traditional venture model in an unusual direction: instead of purely financial return from equity appreciation, firms are buying operational and marketing utility alongside it. It's a hybrid that borrows the trophy-asset appreciation logic of PE-in-sports with the ecosystem-building instincts of venture investing.

The MLS angle is notable too. Unlike the NFL, NBA or MLB, MLS has generally been more open to varied ownership structures and outside capital as it builds valuation off a growing media rights base and continued expansion. That makes a mid-market club like D.C. United a lower-cost entry point for a firm testing the ownership-as-platform thesis before, potentially, chasing a bigger and pricier target.

Whether this becomes a durable third pathway into sports ownership — alongside tech fortunes and PE — depends on returns nobody can measure yet: franchise values have risen steadily for two decades, but a downturn in media rights growth, the NFL's own pending rights renegotiation, or a broader repricing of trophy assets could test how patient venture LPs are willing to be with capital locked into a decades-long hold.

For now, the pattern is clear: Thrive proved the model works at the very top of the market with the Lakers, and smaller firms like Collaborative Fund are moving quickly to stake out their own version before the price of entry climbs any further.