NFL explores options; AI and injury prevention in elite sports; Ultrasonic tones; Ralph Lauren enters esports; Psychedelic VR meditation
Day 14
Skin In The Game covers the business of sports investing, curating the deals, articles, podcasts and people you should know about.
We also run a regulated angel investing group that invests in visionary SportsTech startups, providing a platform for investors, entrepreneurs and brands to collaborate and co-invest.
📞 Confessions
This week I spent some time in the gym rehabbing my back, which has taken a beating from the demands of childcare, driving, training and generally living as a 36-year former amateur rugby player with a posterior chain like a piano string. Why am I telling you this? Because more time in the gym means more time for podcasts.
Rekindling my long-dormant audio habit has already surfaced quite a few life insights, along with greater awareness of companies and investors operating in SportsTech. The quality of podcasting around sports / tech / investing is high, and I’ve eavesdropped on some fascinating conversations whilst torturing myself with a RumbleRoller. Looking forward to sharing in the weeks ahead.
I continue to experiment with the newsletter. Personally, I love the long-form macro content, but I’m also conscious that there’s a lot of it out there. So I’m tilting towards deal flow and more investing-orientated content, balanced out by some unmissable long reads. Engagement so far has been great, albeit from a small number of people who know me personally. But the purpose of this email isn’t to build a massive following; it’s to nurture a small group of like-minded and highly engaged people who want to invest in sports.
I’ve decided to split out the colour on investors playing in deals, compiling this into a spreadsheet where I can get a more structured and comprehensive feel for the VCs, angels, family offices and corporate venture firms that are driving investment in sports. Endless lists of investors made the newsletter too long and honestly, a little meh – I found myself skipping over them to get to the next story. So a separate resource makes a lot of sense. The investor database (more like a spreadsheet with some basic filters) is currently a data-dump that needs refining, but I’m looking forward to sharing when it’s fit for public consumption.
When reading the brilliant content that drops into my inbox from SportsTechX, Nifty Sports, Unofficial Partner, Sports Loft, Fitt Insider, and a bunch of other big beasts in our world, I tell myself that everyone has to start somewhere – all newsletters are a living, breathing work in progress. Let’s hope this one evolves into something useful for the sports community.
Sports clubs & leagues
🏈 NFL Explores Strategic Options for Media Properties, Including Selling Stakes – The National Football League is exploring options for its media properties including selling stakes to strategic partners, a move aimed at expanding the reach of its television networks and digital services. Enter Goldman Sachs…
🥍 Trio of star athletes join Joe Tsai as owners of Vegas lacrosse team – Wayne Gretzky, Dustin Johnson and Steve Nash have joined Alibaba’s billionaire co-founder Joseph Tsai as owners of a new professional lacrosse team in Las Vegas.
⚽️ Bordeaux sold to ex-Lille owner Gerard Lopez – Gerard Lopez, the former president of the Lotus Formula One team, has agreed a takeover deal for French top-flight soccer club Bordeaux.
🏏 India’s Rajasthan Royals cricket team valued at $250m with US stake – RedBird Capital Partners, will take a 15% stake in the IPL team. London-based venture capitalist Manoj Badale, the majority owner of the Royals, has increased his stake in the team from 51% to 65% through his wholly-owned investment vehicle, Emerging Media.
Home fitness
🧘♀️ MyYogaTeacher Raises $3M Seed To Connect U.S. Yogis With Expert Instructors In India – MyYogaTeacher’s app streams interactive lessons directly to students in the US from more than 120 experienced teachers in India.
📺 Fitness startup Portl raises seed funding from Kalaari Capital – Portl Mirror is an intelligent mirror with a 43-inch, 4K screen, embedded bio-sensors, HD cameras, edge-AI Processing with wifi, bluetooth connectivity, it is capable of delivering on-demand and personalized fitness and wellness solutions.
🚴♀️ Health and Socializing: Why People Use Mixed-Reality Sports Platforms – A new study outlines what motivates people to use online platforms like Zwift. The findings offer insights for future iterations of these technologies – and how to market them.
Athletic performance
🖥 Inception with Tal Brown, CEO of Zone7 – Tal Brown is Co-Founder and CEO of Zone7, a data-driven AI system that helps coaches and athletes optimise for peak performance and forecast injury risk. In this episode of Joyance Partner’s excellent podcast, Tal talks about the powerful algorithms his team has developed to perfectly tune a body’s physical workload to stay in peak condition, the challenges (and benefits) of being the first company of its kind to market, and the enormous potential he sees in using Zone7 to improve the lives and productivity of people working under intense conditions across industries. I’m fascinated by this company.
🏉 The sports tech company looking to “unlock the truth” behind the game of rugby – The “Gilbert x Sportable Smart Ball” provides information on the speed of the ball, its spin rate, the distance it travels, and its hang time. This has the scope to provide a much broader range of data around player tracking on the pitch, as well as the impact of collisions, and even in aiding refereeing decisions around forward passes.
📱 Coaching App Asensei Raises $2.2M With Investment from KB Partners, Mark Sanchez – Connected coaching platform Asensei has raised a $2.2m funding round to drive its expansion in other sports (beyond its launch market, rowing).
Sports betting
🎰 Sports betting startup Sporttrade just raised $36m – The 2018-founded sports betting company was a part of the second cohort of the Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Accelerator, powered by Techstars.
📱 Reddit co-founder invests $4M in startup app blending sports betting with social media – Wagr seeks to blend social media with gambling. Expect to see more of this going forward, as established players in the sports betting industry adopt tried-and-tested strategies and product features from the social playbook.
🎲 AI Sports Prediction Platform Quarter4 Raises $1.6m – Quarter4, an AI-backed prediction platform for sports bettors, has raised $1.6m in seed funding. Its machine learning algorithms analyse performance data and current events to predict statistical outcomes and win/loss probability for individual players and teams. Fans can use the predictions to inform their fantasy and betting decisions.
Streaming & media
🏟 The changing face of sports fandom – Television rights have long been the crown jewel for leagues, able to command vast and ever-increasing fees from TV networks and streaming services eager to capitalise on the audiences that sports can deliver. But a new type of sports fan is emerging, with long-term implications for televised games.
👂 The Sonar Company Raises $1m to Bring Ultrasonic Tech to Sports – The startup uses ultrasonic tones (that is, sound beyond the limits of human hearing) to communicate with user devices, promising in-venue and at-home fan engagement opportunities.
📼 Videon Secures $7.3m in Series A Funding – Videon, a provider of edge computing for video, has raised $7.3m in Series A funding.
NFTs & Collectibles
😸 NFTs and me: meet the people trying to sell their memes for millions – Once, people who owned viral photos made little money from them. Now, the ‘original’ can potentially sell for an enormous sum. But are buyers savvy investors – or unwitting dupes? Nice to see some mainstream press coverage of NFTs in the Guardian of all places.
🚀 NFT Site Rarible to Launch Marketplace on Flow Blockchain Following $14.2M Funding Round – Rarible has raised fresh capital to hire new employees and launch an additional marketplace on the Flow blockchain, home to Dapper Labs’ smash hit, NBA Top Shot.
🃏 Upper Deck Invests in NIL Compliance Software Spry – Trading card and collectibles company Upper Deck has invested in Spry, software designed to help college athletes report their endorsement opportunities to their school’s athletic department to ensure compliance with name, image, and likeness regulations.
Athlete empowerment
✊ Inside the rising trend of athletes and celebrities buying ownership stakes in sports teams – Renee Montgomery is part of a wave of current and former athletes, along with a batch of celebrities, buying ownership shares of sports teams. Why is this a trend? Motivations vary and often are myriad.
💫 CAA-Backed Startup Caravan Taps Clearco For $50m Fund Aimed At Building Celebrity Brands – Caravan, a celebrity-brand incubator aligned with talent agency CAA, has raised $50m with e-commerce investor Clearco to support startup business with celebrity backers, with the first check going to fit52, a fitness and wellness app created by country music star Carrie Underwood in 2020.
👟 Allyson Felix Launches Her Own Shoe Company Two Years After Breaking Up With Nike – After leaving Nike in a high-profile breakup in 2019, American track star Allyson Felix – the country’s most decorated female track and field Olympian – couldn’t reach a sponsorship deal with any other footwear brands. So she did something nearly unheard of in the sports business: Felix decided to build a shoe company of her own.
esports
👕 Ralph Lauren enters esports with G2 partnership – Berlin-based competitive gaming organisation G2 Esports has named American clothing brand Ralph Lauren as its exclusive fashion outfitter. The deal marks the first time a luxury brand will officially outfit an entire esports team “on a long term basis”. Really interesting collaboration, this.
Healthcare
🍄 Thiel-backed psychedelic drugmaker valued at $3.2B in Nasdaq debut – Berlin-based biotech Atai Life Sciences, which is exploring the use of psychedelic treatments for mental illnesses, raised $225m from selling 15m shares in its upsized initial public offering on Thursday.
💀 FIGUR8 Raises To Take The Guesswork Out Of Musculoskeletal Diagnostics – FIGUR8, a five-year-old, Boston-based med tech startup focused on wearable musculoskeletal technology, has raised $12m in Series A funding.
🧘♂️ Psychedelic VR meditation startup Tripp raises $11m Series A – Tripp has been building immersive relaxation exercises that seek to blend some of the experiences users may find in guided meditation apps with more free-form experiences that allow users to unplug from their day and explore their thoughts inside a virtual reality headset while watching fractal shapes, glowing trees and planets whirr past them.
❤️ Heart disease screening startup pulls in $43M Series B – Cleerly Coronary, a company that uses A.I powered imaging to analyze heart scans, announced a $43m Series B funding this week.
Apparel
⛹🏽♀️ “We don’t take this for granted”: The Black women reppin’ the Jordan Brand in the WNBA – A woman unveiled the next model of Michael Jordan’s storied line of sneakers. But Satou Sabally isn’t the only one representing the brand in the WNBA. Now in its 25th season, the league has more players rocking the Jumpman logo on their feet than ever. It’s just been a long time coming.
👟 GOAT Will Expand Its Sneaker Marketplace into Asia with a $195M Boost – GOAT, an online marketplace for sneakerheads, has raised $195m in a late-stage funding round, more than doubling its valuation to $3.7bn, the company announced Thursday. In September 2020 the LA-based startup was valued at $1.8bn following its $100m Series E.
🏃♀️ This startup is getting ready to launch running shoes based on how fast you run a mile – Vimazi, a Portland based shoe startup which pairs runners with shoes that match their running pace, has raised $600,000 in seed funding to help launch its high-tech footwear later this year.
Motorsports
🔋 Porsche to make high-performance batteries in joint venture with Customcells – Luxury sports car manufacturer Porsche is going into the battery business. The automaker said Monday it plans to open a new factory that will produce high-performance cells through a joint venture with lithium-ion battery developer Customcells.
Fantasy sports
⚽️ Fanslide: World’s first in-play fantasy football takes the drama beyond kick-off at the Euros – Using real-time data from Opta, users select up to three players at a time to score points from in-game events such as goals, successful tackles, passes and saving shots. Engage data looks good – the company claims that 75% of fans still playing as matches enter the final 15 minutes. Being featured on ITV News before the the football can’t have hurt their user numbers.
Investing
🌳 Making Venture Capital Work for Entrepreneurs – Leila Rastegar Zegna, co-founder and general partner of Kindred Capital, joins Azeem Azhar for a deep dive into venture capital: how it really works, what’s broken, and how to fix it.
💰 “The greatest investors make large concentrated bets where they have a lot of conviction” – Investing legend Stanley Druckenmiller tells us whether we are in another tech bubble, the appeal of Bitcoin, what makes a great investor, and more.
📊 Sports SPACs are coming back – Five SPACs with sports figure leadership have filed amended prospectuses for IPOs overnight, a sign that blank check companies are getting through the revised paperwork necessitated by an SEC crackdown that started in April.
Entrepreneurship
🍝 It shouldn’t be taboo for founders to take cash off the table early – It’s not hard to see why secondary sales — when investors buy equity from existing shareholders in the company, like founders or employees — have a bad rap. But should they?
🌍 Ugo Udezue: From NBA agent to unifying Africa through sport – When Ugo Udezue left his plush job as a National Basketball Association (NBA) agent at one of the top firms in the United States four years ago, he never imagined he would go on to pioneer the first and only African sports apparel company to officially outfit a team at the Olympic Games in Japan this year.
⚽️ Louis Saha: In business and football, there’s no such thing as overnight success– Saha persuasively argues that startups and footballers need more than skills and knowledge to succeed – they need a long-term strategy. Big fan of this guy’s approach to sports, business, and life.
Women in sports
📈 Women fans hold key to future sports revenue growth– “Shrink it and pink it” is how Sports Innovation Lab founder and CEO Angela Ruggiero describes the old, unofficial motto of brands and marketers trying to reach fans of women’s sports. Since then, options have exploded for fans and consumers, and a new study of their habits has found the industry may be leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table by not adapting alongside fans and growing women’s sports leagues.
Niche sports
🏸 Blackstone’s Schwarzman makes bid for gold with Olympic largesse – Since 2013, the private equity titan has become the largest individual donor to the USA Track & Field Foundation, committing $12m to athletes training for the games – illustrative of the lack of financial resources available to Olympians even in wealthy countries such as the US.
🥏 The Rise of the $10m Disc Golf Celebrity – How much can athletes really make in niche sports? A whole lot more than you might think. Disc golfer Paul McBeth set a new standard by signing an eight-figure endorsement contract – and his deal might only be the beginning.
Some tweets
Monster newsletter this week. Hope you get as much out of it as I have.
Cheers,
Ed
—
Edward Rhys
Founder & CEO / Skin In The Game
www.skininthegamegroup.com
🙏 A favour
I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. If you did, please share with friends who you think will get something out of it.
If you can spare the time, please hit me up with feedback. Whether entrepreneur, investor, executive or sports fan, your input will help me to improve what I’m doing and serve the sports community better.
You received this email because you signed up via our website.
Skin In The Game is an angel investing group connecting investors with visionary SportsTech startups. We provide a regulated platform for fans, athletes, entrepreneurs and brands to collaborate and co-invest. By investing in SportsTech we can unleash the full potential of sports, enriching the lives of people everywhere.
SKIN IN THE GAME LIMITED is registered in England and Wales under Company Number 13200102 and with the FCA as an Appointed Representative with FRN 946089. SKIN IN THE GAME LIMITED is an Appointed Representative of Finex LLP which is authorised and regulated in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) with firm reference number 507537.