Why We Invested: Fanstake
As early-stage investors that intentionally emphasize market size, growth rates, and disruption dynamics, we’ve been hard-pressed at Courtside to find a sector within the sports world experiencing more rapid growth and change than NIL in college sports.
Since July 1, 2021 — when the NCAA first allowed college athletes to monetize their name, image, and likeness (“NIL”) — over $2.4 billion has entered the NIL ecosystem in football alone, growing a staggering 43% annually according to Knight-Newhouse. This explosion in athlete funding has had an immediate and obvious impact on collegiate decision making, with 2.3k athletes in men’s basketball entering the transfer portal in 2025 (representing 40% of all players and 11% growth from 2024).
But for all the headlines, hype, opinions, and change, most fans haven’t participated in NIL beyond just reading articles online and hoping that their school of choice is doing its part to stay competitive. With nearly all NIL activity to-date coming from donors, brands, or school-affiliated collectives, NIL has remained an opaque and frustrating topic for the larger population of fans.
This is exactly where Fanstake comes in.
After following the NIL market for years and patiently waiting for the right venture-scale opportunity, we are thrilled to share that Courtside has led Fanstake’s $6.25M Seed round, with participation from Susa Ventures, Will Ventures, Scrum Ventures, Myriad Ventures, Alumni Ventures and others as we back a team we believe is building the future of NIL.
Fanstake is the first fan-powered NIL marketplace and engagement platform. The company allows college sports fans to pledge money to recruit or retain athletes for their favorite teams — but only paying if the athlete commits to their team. As a fully transparent, gamified platform, Fanstake is directly allowing fans to influence the recruiting strategies of their alma maters and programs of choice, all through a fully compliant NIL marketplace.
Founded by Greg Glass, Donnie Flood, and Alex Boisvert, Fanstake is led by a high-powered group of successful former founders with consumer software experience. The team previously built Bizo, a marketing software company acquired by LinkedIn for $175M and have since held senior leadership roles at multiple unicorns including Headspace, Guild, and LinkedIn.
In Fanstake, this team is tackling a rapidly growing category still held back by an inability to meet untapped consumer demand. While top school collectives are spending $14M+ per year on average per Opendorse, the long-tail of 195M collegiate fans (largest fanbase in the US) have been left out of perhaps the biggest recruiting driver in today’s landscape. Fans are clearly willing to support their schools financially as attendance and ticket sales have hit all time highs, but current methods of fan NIL giving facilitated by schools (seat fees, concession surcharges, and athletic fees) have been received poorly, largely seen as pass-through costs with opaque outcomes rather than a tool for fan engagement.
Fanstake flips this dynamic on its head, creating a fully transparent and fan-controlled method for NIL giving via an open-market competition, putting fans in the drivers seat of spend, recruiting strategy, and fanbase engagement, all benefits not available to consumers today.
While individual opinions on the impact of NIL range widely, it is abundantly clear to us at Courtside that the future of college sports involves fair and transparent athlete compensation. While “Phase 1” of this effort occurred in 2021 with the allowance of NIL monetization and “Phase 2” of direct athlete payments is nearly complete with the House Settlement case, we believe that “Phase #3” in NIL is the democratization of athlete compensation beyond just the NCAA, schools, and boosters and instead to the entire fanbase. We believe Fanstake is perfectly positioned to help usher in this new era of NIL monetization at scale.
🔗 Learn more at Fanstake.com
✉️ Interested in talking with the team? We’re happy to connect you.
