Courtside Ventures

We don't say this often...we are HIRING! Since 2016 we've kept the Courtside team deliberately small while building a portfolio of 130 companies across sports, entertainment and consumer, including The Athletic, StockX and Beam. Adding someone new is a big decision for us, so we're looking for the right person. We're hiring an Associate to work directly with our investment team across the full life of the fund. What you will do: → Sourcing: build your own engine of founders, co-investors and communities → Diligence: lead the research and defend the recommendation at IC → Thesis: pick categories, go deep and turn a point of view into deals → Portfolio: support founders after we invest → Voice: write publicly for the firm, with your name on the thinking We are looking for someone with previous VC experience, uses AI as a core part of their work, and has real conviction about where our categories are headed. It helps even more if you've sourced a deal that got done or built something of your own. This is a position with high autonomy and the ability to see the full lifecycle of fund management. Apply here: https://lnkd.in/eh_Mts9P

Eloelo tested Dolphin AI on 45,000 videos before anyone outside the company knew it existed. Most AI video tools are built first and then go looking for a use case. Dolphin went the other way. The Eloelo team built it to fix their own problem. They release 200+ new dramas and 100K+ new creatives every month. Off-the-shelf tools kept failing at the hard parts: scenes with multiple shots, and keeping characters and visuals consistent past the 8–10 second mark. So they built the fix in-house. After 45K videos, it works well enough that they're opening it up. Today, Dolphin AI, an agentic studio for end-to-end video production, opens for early access. The best infrastructure usually comes from teams who needed it first. Few content companies anywhere run at Eloelo's volume, and most AI video products never get tested that hard. Congrats Saurabh Pandey and the whole Eloelo team! Early access link in the comments. #GenerativeAI #AIVideo #CreatorEconomy #VentureCapital

Courtside Ventures has invested in SYSTEM LABORATORIES, INC., which has now raised $20M from Patron Fund, Vine Ventures, Courtside, Daybreak, SV Angels, Will Ventures, RiverPark and more. In the rapidly growing world of peptides, System is a unique model built for trusted scale: 🧬 Consumer brand with an async clinician layer 🏭 Company-owned 503A compounding pharmacy 🔗 B2B arm white-labeling that same infrastructure to clinics and telehealth 🙌 Congrats Adam Steinle + team, who are already seeing rocket ship growth. For more on why we invested — link in comments. #Peptides #Longevity #ConsumerHealth #CourtsideVentures

Everyone's collecting health data. Far less are actually using it. Courtside portfolio company Eternal just launched something we haven't seen before: AI-personalized podcasts built from your wearable data, blood labs, and DEXA scans. Connect your devices → get a weekly podcast breaking down your sleep, recovery, movement, and progress. Upload labs → get an episode explaining what matters and what to do next. No more dashboards nobody reads. Just a coach in your ear. The future of health isn't more data. It's making the data speak. Congrats to Alex Mather and team on the launch. Try for free on the App Store now! Link in comments on the announcement! #HealthTech #AI #Wearables #PersonalizedHealth #CourtsideVentures

1,000+ new US millionaires are minted every single day. F.P. Journe makes ~900 watches a year — total. You can do the math. Our Partner Vasu Kulkarni just wrote the clearest articulation we've seen of why collectibles are still early in their transition from niche passion items into a global cultural asset class. A few numbers that stopped us cold: → An Akrivia AK-06 just sold for $3.8M — roughly 30x its original retail → Watches above CHF 50,000 are 1.4% of volume but drove 89% of Swiss watch market growth in 2025 → The most expensive watch ever ($31M) is a rounding error in art, where Salvator Mundi cleared $450M → Babe Ruth's "Called Shot" jersey: $24.1M. Maradona's "Hand of God" shirt: $9.3M The bear case is easy: prices look insane. The bull case is more interesting: art had a 250-year head start to build auction infrastructure, provenance language, and cultural legitimacy. Watches and memorabilia are compressing that same process into decades. The objects haven't changed. The audience has. Wealth is growing. The internet made collecting social at global scale. Supply of the best objects is fixed. And meaning has no cost of goods sold. Link to the full essay in the comments. #Collectibles #AlternativeAssets #VentureCapital #Investing #Culture

Yesterday in Los Angeles, we hosted a highly curated event at Canon Collectibles discussing the future of sports, media, and entertainment. Oliver R. led a discussion exploring where capital, attention, and enterprise value are flowing next in sports — from emerging leagues and global sports properties, to streaming rights, athlete-led businesses, prediction markets, and more. A huge thank you to Tony Ressler, Principal Owner of the Atlanta Hawks and Executive Chairman of Ares Management; Rich Paul, CEO & Co-Founder of KLUTCH SPORTS GROUP, LLC; and Kort Schnabel, Partner at Ares Management, Co-head of US Direct Lending and Partner at Ares Sports, Media, and Entertainment Fund, for a candid and insightful discussion. We’re grateful to everyone who joined us and helped make the evening such a strong reflection of what Courtside is built around: high-conviction thinking at the intersection of sports, entertainment, and technology.

🃏 Courtside Ventures is excited to announce our continued investment in Packz, a gamified collectibles platform that mirrors the excitement of physical pack openings via a digital experience. The digital pack opening sector has exploded over the past 12 months, and Packz is bringing a brand new format, geared towards gamers, into this burgeoning category. We're proud to continue backing Rahul Khatti and Balazs Szamosfalvi in their Seed round, with $10.7M in aggregate raised alongside Makers Fund, The Raine Group, RiverPark Ventures, Sharp Alpha, and executives from DraftKings Inc. Check out the company's full announcement 👇 #Collectibles #TradingCards #VC #CourtsideVentures #Gaming

In case you missed it last week... 📣 Private equity just made its biggest bet on sports yet. As detailed in The 4th Quarter's latest newsletter, KKR’s acquisition of Arctos is a direct signal that sports is now a core institutional asset class at the highest level. In short: 💰 The deal is valued ~$1.4B upfront with additional upside tied to performance.  🏟️ Arctos brings team stakes across multiple major pro leagues and deep franchise relationships.  📈 KKR gains a scaled platform spanning sports investing, GP solutions, and secondaries. Bottom line: Institutional capital isn’t circling sports anymore, it’s building permanent infrastructure inside it. Read the full breakdown 👇 🔗 https://lnkd.in/g7_5aWWw #SportsBusiness #PrivateEquity #SportsTech #VC #CourtsideVentures #The4thQuarter

🧠 Courtside Ventures has invested in Egra AI — building EEG foundation models that make brain signals usable for real-world products. We’re especially excited about what this unlocks for the future of sports + wellness: 🔹 Performance & training, personalized: real-time insight into cognitive load, focus, stress, and fatigue - so athletes (and everyday wellness enthusiasts) can train smarter, not just harder. 🔹 Recovery & readiness: objective signals to guide return-to-train decisions, optimize sleep/recovery protocols, and reduce overtraining by catching strain before it shows up in output. 🔹 Safety & the next era of brain health: better detection + monitoring around concussion risk, post-impact recovery, and neurological wellness - moving from subjective symptom reporting to measurable signal over time. Huge congrats to Brian Daley and Peyton Chui , who bring a rare combination of ambition + pace. Excited to partner alongside a16z speedrun, SV Angel, Pear VC, Liquid 2, Soma, Afore, and Link Ventures. 👀 Egra is hiring top ML researchers / engineers — details in the comments.

🏈 The Super Bowl isn’t just a game. It’s the ultimate business engine. This week’s The 4th Quarter newsletter breaks down the three biggest business takeaways from Super Bowl LX — from record-level advertiser demand to the expanding role of AI and capital across the sports ecosystem. 📺 Ad inventory sold out early as brands continue pouring billions into live sports.  🤖 AI is now coordinating massive real-time workforces behind the scenes of Super Bowl week.  💰 New funds, deals, and celebrity-driven marketing show the business of sports is only accelerating. Bottom line: Live sports remain the most powerful intersection of media, technology, and capital in the world. Read the full breakdown 👇 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gptHeyNK #SportsBusiness #SuperBowl #Media #SportsTech #VC #CourtsideVentures #The4thQuarter