In March, SV invested in a pre-series A round for Lolli, an e-commerce site that gives customers rewards in bitcoin for their purchases. In 2021, Serena Ventures funded multiple crypto companies. Serena Williams photographed in June 2019 by Levon Biss for Forbes. “68% or 70% of our portfolio are companies founded by women or people of color.” “When I’m talking about Serena Ventures, we invest in women, we invest in people of color, that’s our thing,” Williams told Forbes. Today, Serena Ventures has invested in 50+ early stage start-ups with a portfolio market cap of $33 billion. “Yes, I know I can keep a secret,” the tennis star wrote on Instagram.

In 2014, the 23-time Grand Slam winner quietly launched her own venture capital firm, only revealing five years later in an April 2019 Instagram post that she had founded Serena Ventures. ”When we think of web3 and we think of crypto: that’s going to be the biggest space for the next several years in terms of growth,” Williams said. Williams said she sees a great range of future crypto applications for tennis and appreciates that Sorare takes multiple approaches, which include gamification and NFTs. The tennis player laughed and said “I pushed Nicolas for tennis since the day I met him.” Recently, the Australian Open made headlines through a partnership with metaverse platform Decentraland, creating a virtual replication of the tournament grounds for fans to explore.

Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian at the 2018 wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. They deliver meaningful interactions between users and their favorite teams or players, which I thought was different.” Speaking of her motivation, Williams added: “Sorare does more than just collectibles. “I actually was introduced to Sorare through my husband,” said Williams about Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, who also runs the venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, and invested in Sorare as part of its $50 million series A round in February 2021. In addition to her board role, she made a personal investment in Sorare, she told Forbes, rather than investing through Serena Ventures, her own venture capital firm.

At Sorare, the 40-year old athlete and financier will advise a board featuring SoftBank CEO Marcelo Claure, who owns Spain’s second division side Girona FC and sits on the board of WeWork and T-Mobile, as well as German fintech investor Christian Miele, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton (famous for his early investments in Twitter and Yelp), and Sorare’s CEO Nicolas Julia and COO Ryan Spoon.įor Williams, Sorare falls within the sweet spot between her interest in crypto and sports.

Serena williams sofascore