Courtside Ventures announced its third fund, totaling $100 million, on January 19, 2023. The firm said Fund III would accelerate early-stage investment globally in sports, gaming and lifestyle applications, with its named core verticals including sports, fitness, collectibles and gaming. This is a report of the 2023 announcement, not evidence that the fund is still raising or deploying capital today.
What Courtside said Fund III would invest in
Courtside described itself as an early-stage investor looking for companies at the intersection of sports, gaming and lifestyle. In the announcement, the firm identified four key verticals: sports, fitness, collectibles and gaming. Partner Deepen Parikh characterized the approach as backing founders and ideas in those areas; that statement expresses the firm’s own investment thesis, not an independent assessment of its track record.
The wording in the announcement matters: it names fitness, while the fundraise headline’s broader reference to wellness fits the firm’s lifestyle framing. Courtside’s current homepage describes its focus as sports, lifestyle and gaming, with examples such as sports content and regulation, personalized wellness, collectibles marketplaces, gaming infrastructure and global markets. That current description may differ from the firm’s positioning in 2023. See Courtside Ventures and its portfolio page; those sector labels are the firm’s own.
Companies named in the announcement
Courtside’s January 2023 release named the following as early Fund III investments. This is the release’s early list, not a complete or current portfolio.
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- Hypothetic
- Matchday
- Mojo
- Xpoint
- Jackpot.com
- Venly
- Planet Mojo
- Bezel
- Fliff
- Fermat
- Fello
The release also pointed to earlier investments including The Athletic, Beam, StockX, 100 Thieves, WinZO, VEO, Religion of Sports, Rei do Pitaco, Freeletics, FanCraze and Paceline. It said The Athletic had been acquired by The New York Times and Beam by Microsoft. Those examples show the breadth of the firm’s stated investment interests; they do not establish the current status of every company or product.
What the announcement said about the fund and firm
Courtside reported that Fund III brought its total committed capital to more than $200 million in assets under management at the time of the January 19, 2023 announcement. It also said that, since launching in 2016, the firm had invested in more than 80 companies across eight countries. These are figures reported by the firm in that announcement, not independently verified current totals.
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The release further claimed that Fund I had returned 1.61x in net DPI proceeds to limited partners. That is Courtside’s performance claim as stated in the 2023 announcement, not an independently audited performance figure established here. The release said more than 50 new relationships joined Fund III.
Who the announcement named as investors
The January 2023 announcement described investors from professional sports ownership, business and industry, and athlete communities. Its examples included:
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- Owners and ownership groups: Tony Ressler, Dan Gilbert, David Blitzer, the Haslam family, the Tisch family, the Lerner family, and Idan Ofer.
- Other named investors: Alec Litowitz, John Burbank and Dan Sundheim.
- Strategic investors: Dick’s Sporting Goods, Superbet, Arctos Partners, Wellness Holding and Gametime Capital.
- Athletes: Larry Fitzgerald, Shaquille O’Neal and Jacob Trouba.
These names and categories are attributed to the January 2023 announcement and should not be read as a current investor roster.
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The $100 million figure describes the size Courtside announced for Fund III in January 2023. The announcement does not establish the fund’s present deployment status, Courtside’s current assets under management, or the current performance of the fund. For broader context on how the firm describes its investment scope, Courtside partner Kai Bond later wrote about digital media, gaming, collectibles, wellness and live entertainment, presenting sports as part of a wider consumer and technology culture. That essay is the firm’s perspective, rather than a separate measure of Fund III activity.
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