The NFL was the last of the four major North American professional sports leagues to allow institutional investors to buy stakes in its teams, changing its ownership rules in 2024, and although InStudio Ventures isn’t among the eight private equity firms that have earned the league’s stamp of approval, founder and managing partner Danny Cortenraede has found his way into pro football anyway.
InStudio’s stakes in the Buffalo Bills and the Los Angeles Chargers, acquired via a partnership with another firm, are the most attention-grabbing names anchoring a $50 million sports and performance fund the Los Angeles-based firm is launching on Tuesday.
But while those prestige assets—along with a small slice of the Aston Martin Formula 1 team—will bolster the fund’s credibility in a crowded marketplace, Cortenraede plans to invest the majority of its assets in earlier-stage startups bringing AI into sports.
“These anchor investments have outperformed the S&P 500 already for 20 years, but we don’t expect to make 10x our money on them—let’s be realistic,” says Cortenraede, who was raised in the Netherlands and immigrated to the United States eight years ago. “How we will achieve a 3x multiple on our fund is by also investing in sports technology companies.”
One portfolio company Cortenraede is particularly excited about is Springbok Analytics, which uses AI to create 3D visualizations from MRI data. The health analytics startup can take a full-body scan and measure, for instance, muscle volume against benchmarks for the athlete’s age, sex and body size.
InStudio participated last year in Springbok’s $5 million Series A round, which counted the NBA’s venture capital arm among its investors and valued the startup at $25 million, according to Pitchbook. Springbok has landed partnerships with professional teams including the Cleveland Browns, the Houston Texans, the Toronto Blue Jays and Leicester City FC, and Cortenraede is using prior relationships with clubs and players in Europe to expand Springbok’s presence globally. He also thinks the opportunity to take the technology directly to consumers could accelerate Springbok’s growth.
“You have all these guys who are doing Ironmans or Hyrox—people who are not professional athletes but still want to challenge themselves—putting a lot of money and time behind running and working out,” Cortenraede says. “Now, I can do a full-body scan, and I can actually see how much muscle mass I have and how I need to train a specific muscle, and if I have an injury. These tools were never available for people like myself.”
Cortenraede has plenty of experience building startups himself. After a decade in business development and marketing at Vodafone, Sony and T-Mobile, he cofounded a production agency based in Amsterdam called Enterprise Media in 2015 and a social marketing agency called Wannahaves.
Wannahaves worked with brands such as Adidas, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain, helping Cortenraede break into the sports industry and build relationships with athletes. Before long, he moved to New York to expand the agency’s reach in the U.S., collaborating with Major League Soccer and American businesses like Nike and Budweiser.
Cortenraede also earned his executive MBA in 2024 at Harvard Business School, where he was classmates with NFL quarterback Jameis Winston in the business of entertainment, media and sports program. The two became friends, and Winston has become an engaged investor in InStudio’s fund, Cortenraede says, often sitting in on meetings where potential deals are discussed.
Beyond Winston, 65% of the limited partners in InStudio’s fund are professional athletes, including Atlanta Braves relief pitcher Joe Jiménez and two members of the Dutch national soccer team, Manchester City’s Nathan Aké and Liverpool’s Cody Gakpo, among other names from the NFL, the NBA, MLB, the Premier League, the Bundesliga and La Liga.
The fund will have standard fees for venture capital firms—management fees of around 2% on its assets and 20% of the profits. Cortenraede says InStudio’s NFL investments are in a “specially structured framework” designed to give LPs efficient access to those teams but declined to specify how additional fees would be negotiated or passed through when InStudio teams up with other private equity firms. He did not share which of the eight approved firms InStudio partnered with, but Arctos Partners is the only one known to have stakes in both the Bills and the Chargers.
The average NFL team has grown in value from $423 million in 2000 to $7.1 billion in 2025, according to Forbes, producing a compound annual growth rate of 12% that has outperformed the S&P 500’s 8% annualized return in that span. Much of that outperformance could be eaten away by high fees, but Cortenraede expects valuations to continue climbing, driven by the league’s current media rights deals, which will pay teams more than $125 billion over 11 years through 2033.
Now, Cortenraede is leaning on the network he has built over the last ten years to cast a wide net and help the most innovative startups generate truly outsized returns. InStudio is aiming to make another four or five investments in sports tech startups this year, targeting companies raising a Series A round or later that have at least $1 million in annual recurring revenue. Cortenraede expects the fund’s average investment to be around $3 million, to help scale these businesses.
“If we cannot add value, we will not invest in the company—it’s that simple,” he says. “Data, infrastructure, AI and fan engagement are all top of mind, and great solutions are there. We’re very selective, but we are ready to deploy.”
