Why We Invested: Eternal

Courtside Ventures
3 min readJan 14, 2025

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You’d be hard pressed to find a consumer trend more talked about in 2024 than wellness and preventative health.

Prevention-based / wellness care, in contrast to traditional / treatment-focused care, has exploded in popularity across the US over the past twelve months. According to Deloitte, prevention-based wellness spend is on pace to surpass traditional care for the first time ever by 2033 (at which time it will be a $3.5T market). With 82% of consumers now considering wellness to be a top priority in their everyday lives, we’ve reached a pivotal shift in the health industry where consumers are allocating outsized wallet share towards wellness.

While wellness as a whole has taken many forms, our team at Courtside has believed that an outsized crossover exists within sports x wellness. Often at the leading edge of health and training innovations, athletes have always emphasized wellness at a higher clip than the greater population, but have often seen solutions come to market that bifurcate their two lives…serving them either as athletes or individuals…but rarely both.

Our latest investment aims to bring these two worlds back together. It is with this backdrop that we are thrilled to announce Courtside’s investment in Eternal, a new healthcare service tailored to lifelong athletes. We are thrilled to co-lead the company’s $13M seed round with Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Founders Fund, Next Ventures, Bling Capital, and more.

Founded by Alex Mather, the former co-founder of The Athletic (Courtside Fund I portfolio company), Eternal aims to keep athletes active, healthy, and performing their best for as long as possible. Offering a membership model, the company combines robust assessments, medical diagnostics, and ongoing guidance and accountability coaching to help athletes optimize performance, address injuries, adapt to hormonal shifts, manage long-term health, and achieve personalized athletic goals well into their later decades.

Part of Eternal’s key value-add is in its sport-based approach. Initially focused on runners, cyclists, and triathletes, the company will offer best-in-class, tailored coaching with expertise on a sport-by-sport basis. Assessments and curriculum for members are curated by some of the top, sport-specific minds in the world including Stacy Sims, (expert in female physiology and nutrition science), Lauren Fleshman (former pro-distance runner and run coach), Andrew Talansky (triathlete, coach, and former pro cyclist), and Rick Celebrini (former pro and head of sports medicine for the Warriors).

Eternal will be opening up its platform (and doors) in San Francisco and New York City in the first half of 2025, and is currently taking on prospective members via its early-access waitlist at eternal.co.

It’s become clear to us at Courtside that while preventative health is the future, functioning health that lets consumers do what they love longer is what is most important. In a recent Consumer Survey that asked whether people would rather live 25% healthier or 25% longer, a clear majority across every generation indicated they’d rather live healthier. Within sports, athletes spend thousands of hours in their first couple decades of life dedicated to their craft in hopes of competing at a high level. While nothing (yet) can truly turn back the clock, we believe that athletes can and should be able to enjoy and compete in sport into their marginal decades as a way to truly live fully fulfilled lives.

We could not be more thrilled to be backing Alex (and team) once again, as we aim to make sports participation a lifelong endeavor.

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Courtside Ventures
Courtside Ventures

Written by Courtside Ventures

NYC based early stage venture fund focused on sports, lifestyle and gaming

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