🔊 Why Star Athletes Are Investing $11M Into This Recreation Startup

Rec Technologies (Rec), a modern operating system for local parks and community recreation, announced it has raised $11 million in a Series A round led by Crosslink Capital.

Rec was founded in 2022 by Birju Kadakia and Rachel Williams, who worked together at Uber in the mid-2010s.

Athlete investors Larry Fitzgerald, Jr. and Kelvin Beachum, Jr. joined the round alongside Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman's Thirty Five Ventures (35V), Joe Montana's Liquid 2 Ventures, and Marquee Ventures, a fund spun out of the ownership group of the Chicago Cubs.

The funding will accelerate Rec's expansion into new markets, hire more staff, and deepen investment in AI-powered features that can transform recreation operations.

Why Does This Matter?

Investing in rec centers and community gyms feels… unsexy.

But that’s exactly the point.

The sports tech industry is crowded with flashy plays, fan engagement apps, virtual gaming, and streaming platforms, among others.

Yet the biggest opportunities often come from fixing the boring, broken stuff.

Community sports is a $30+ billion market, and most of it is still stuck on outdated software.

Think clunky booking systems. Paper waivers. Endless manual processes.

Rec is betting that if you modernize the infrastructure, you unlock more than convenience.

You can create recurring revenue, increase participation, and develop SaaS models that can scale.

That’s the lesson for founders and investors: the next wave of sports innovation isn’t always about what looks good on the surface. It’s about solving the friction points nobody else wants to touch.

That’s where billion-dollar outcomes are hiding.

And athlete capital is starting to get it.

Durant, Fitzgerald, Beachum, and others aren’t just backing “cool” sports startups.

They’re backing the ones fixing the pipes underneath sports.

If you’re paying attention, that’s where the smart bets are being made.

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• Genius Sports Acquires Sports Innovation Lab. Genius Sports$GENI ( ▲ 1.67% ), a leading sports data and technology company, has acquired Sports Innovation Lab, a fan data and analytics firm. Sports Innovation Lab was co-founded in 2017 by Angela Ruggiero (Olympic medalist and Hockey Hall of Fame inductee) and Josh Walker. The acquisition helps Genius Sports build the most comprehensive fan database in sports and entertainment, tracking billions of annual transactions, including purchases, attendance, and viewership. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed (more here).

• The Chiliz Group Acquires Majority Stake In OG Esports. The Chiliz Group, parent company of fan token platform Socios.com, has announced the majority acquisition of European esports organization OG Esports. The blockchain provider and operator has purchased a 51% controlling stake in the organization. Socios.com will become the exclusive wallet and engagement platform for $OG Fan Tokens, establishing $OG as the flagship example of the new fan economy. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed (more here).

• Echo Investment Capital & Chickasaw Nation Invests In OKC Soccer Club. Echo Investment Capital and the Chickasaw Nation announced a strategic investment in OKC’s new soccer initiative, Echo’s project to build a professional soccer club in a new stadium in downtown Oklahoma City. The investment, made through the Chickasaw Nation's wholly owned subsidiary Sovereign Native Holdco, LLC, joins existing investors Echo, Russell Westbrook Enterprises, and the OKC for Soccer ownership team. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed (more here).

• Players Health & Teamworks Announce Partnership. Players Health, the leading provider of athlete safety and insurance solutions, announced an insurance partnership with Teamworks, the Operating System for Sports, which powers 99% of D1 athletic departments and more than 6,500 elite sports teams globally. This partnership integrates Players Health’s insurance quote generation capabilities into Teamworks’ General Manager contracting workflow, enabling athletic departments to seamlessly assess insurance options in real-time as they build and manage student-athlete agreements in a rapidly evolving college sports landscape (more here).

• Versant & League One Volleyball Announce Partnership. Versant announced it has acquired media rights for League One Volleyball (LOVB), bringing the premier women’s professional volleyball league in the US to a national audience on USA Network starting January 2026. Under the multi-year agreement, USA Network will exclusively air the league’s Match of the Week in prime time on Wednesday nights at 8 pm ET. The agreement also provides for live prime-time coverage of the league’s playoffs, including the 2026 LOVB Championship Match, where the champions will be crowned live on USA Network (more here).

• State Street Investment Management & WNBA Announce Partnership. State Street Investment Management and the WNBA announced a multi-year partnership, making State Street Investment Management and its SPY ETF the official investment management and exchange-traded fund (ETF) partner of the league. As part of the partnership, State Street and SPY will serve as the title sponsor of the WNBA Preseason and Coach of the Year Award. State Street Investment Management and SPY will also be the presenting partner for “Year 1”, a rookie content series profiling a select group of exciting first-year players. They will join other WNBA sponsors as an associate partner for the WNBA Draft (more here).

• Como 1907 & The Players Fund Announce Partnership. Italian professional soccer club Como 1907 and The Players Fund, a UK-based athlete-led venture fund, announced a collaboration to launch Como Ventures, an initiative that allows early-stage companies to test, grow, and scale within the Italian soccer market. Applications are now open for the program, which is targeting startups in six key themes, including luxury hospitality and travel, media tech, merchandising and retail, health tech and human performance, next-generation mobility, and sustainability. Selected companies will present in front of investors, sponsors, and media later this season. The Players Fund will also advise Como 1907 on broader innovation and investment opportunities (more here).

• Tom Brady Returns To Play In A Saudi Flag Football Tournament. The seven-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback was announced this week as the headliner for a new flag football event featuring both active and retired NFL players, which will take place on March 21st, 2026, in Saudi Arabia. According to Fanatics, the sports merchandiser partly behind the event, Brady will make his "first official return to the field" since retirement by taking part in a three-team round-robin tournament to be broadcast by FOX Sports and played under the same five-on-five format to be used when flag football makes its Olympics debut in 2028, on a 50-yard field (more here).

• NBA Champion Zaza Pachulia, WNBA Star Breanna Stewart, & Other Top Athletes Partner With Basketball Tech Company. Long gone are the days of training without the assistance of data. Shooting percentages have always been a key metric in basketball, and Shoot 360 has stepped in to help elevate player development. Shoot 360 is a basketball innovation firm with a sharp focus on skill development for athletes of varied skill levels. The company leverages immersive technology and promotes a data-driven training environment (more here).

• Josh Harris Says You Likely Won’t See More Sports Assets Going Public As Values Soar. Over the last decade, private equity investor Josh Harris has built one of the largest conglomerates in the sports industry. Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, which he co-founded with Blackstone executive David Blitzer in 2017, owns majority stakes in many of the world's most valuable sports leagues. That has quickly made HBSE one of the most valuable sports ownership groups globally. But those continued rising valuations raise a question that harkens back to Harris’s time as a private equity executive: Will HBSE, or other sports teams and large ownership conglomerates, start to look toward going public? (more here).

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• Are Youth Sports Getting Too Expensive? The youth sports industry generates about $40 billion in annual revenue, according to the Aspen Institute. About 60 million children play sports, and the average US sports family spent $1,016 on its child’s primary sport in 2024, a 46% increase since 2019, according to the Aspen Institute’s latest parent survey in partnership with Utah State University and Louisiana Tech University. That’s a far cry from the days when youth sports were dominated by locally run offshoots of nonprofit organizations, such as the Catholic Youth Organization, Pop Warner, and Little League Baseball (more here).

• Private Equity's Growing Influence In Sports. Multi-club ownership backed by private equity is on the rise in international sports. Former Houston Astros General Manager and current Blue Crow Sports Group CEO Jeff Luhnow believes he has found an unexplored niche: owning and operating clubs in desirable locations with significant growth opportunities. However, Luhnow believes that in the current landscape, it's buyer beware, especially in European football. He joined Carol Massar, Tim Stenovec, and Bloomberg News Texas Bureau Chief Julie Fine on Bloomberg Business Week daily to discuss (more here).

This week’s guest on the Vetted Sports podcast is María Teresa Pérez Lobatón.

María Teresa Pérez Lobatón is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Mural Ventures.

Mural Ventures is an advisory and investment firm led by former founders in the convergence of sports, media, and tech. They focus on opportunities specifically in Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries.

In this episode, we discuss:
‣ Why she started Mural Ventures and their investment thesis
‣ The current sports investment landscape in Latin America
‣ How she sees the region evolving over time

Check out the full episode here: Apple | Spotify | YouTube