Alexis Ohanian told Time Magazine this week that his venture fund, Seven Seven Six, is treating women's sports as a decade-long infrastructure play, not a brand bet. The portfolio now exceeds $400 million in deployed capital across 21 women's sports properties, including Angel City FC (NWSL), a pro women's volleyball league, and deals yet to announce. Ohanian framed the thesis around three catalysts: franchise valuations rising faster than men's equivalents, sponsorship dollars rotating from overpriced legacy inventory, and the absence of bloated stadium debt or restrictive broadcast contracts.
His read is structural. NWSL franchises traded at $2 million in 2019; Angel City's recent minority stake priced the club near $180 million, a 90x gain in four years. Compare that to MLS expansion fees, which climbed from $100 million to $500 million over a similar window but now face slowing demand as the league approaches 30 teams. Ohanian's argument: women's leagues are where men's leagues were in the early growth phase, but with modern media distribution and sponsor data from the start. No legacy rights deals locking up inventory until 2035. No publicly financed stadiums requiring municipal approvals. You can buy the Philadelphia franchise of a women's professional league for the price of a minority stake in an NBA G League team.
The sponsor math follows. Brands like Ally, Google, and Visa have rotated budgets toward women's properties because the audience skews younger, converts faster on social, and delivers cleaner activation without the compliance risk that trails men's leagues. Ohanian cited one unnamed consumer brand that shifted 15% of its sports budget from NFL inventory to NWSL and WNBA deals last year, capturing better engagement per dollar. That reallocation accelerates when men's leagues keep raising rights fees while Nielsen ratings drift downward. Women's soccer viewership on CBS averaged 915,000 per match in 2023, up 26% year-over-year, while MLS on the same network stayed flat at 330,000. The CMO conversation is no longer about good optics; it's about where the next 10 million households come from.
Ohanian's fund also owns stakes in media infrastructure: a women's sports podcast network, a highlight distribution platform, and a ticketing analytics company focused on family buyers. The theory is that women's sports will bypass the bloated middle layer—regional sports networks, legacy ticket brokers, stadium naming-rights deals structured in the 1990s—and build digital-native economics from scratch. Seven Seven Six is betting that the winner in women's sports is not the team that mimics the NBA's playbook but the one that treats fans like a DTC customer base with known preferences and lifetime value.
The portfolio has two unannounced exits in progress, both in the $60 million to $80 million range, according to a person familiar. One is a facility-booking platform that started with women's club soccer and now handles 40% of youth sports scheduling in suburban Philadelphia. The other is a sports nutrition brand that built its customer base through WNBA and NWSL sponsorships and is now in late-stage talks with a strategic buyer. Ohanian declined to name the companies but noted that both reached profitability within 30 months, faster than comparable men's sports startups from the same vintage.
What to watch: Seven Seven Six is circling a second NWSL franchise bid, likely in the South or Midwest, with a decision expected before the league's next expansion deadline in Q2 2025. The fund is also in conversations with two European football clubs about launching women's teams with separate capital structures, a model that would let investors buy the women's side without taking a stake in the men's operations. Ohanian's next media appearance is at a March investor summit in Miami, where he's expected to detail the fund's infrastructure stack in more depth.
The signal here is not that Ohanian believes women's sports will be as large as men's sports. It's that he believes they will be as profitable, sooner, with less capital risk and cleaner unit economics. The thesis is that the infrastructure never got built, so the early money buys control, not a seat at a crowded table.
The takeaway
Ohanian's **$400M+** women's sports fund bets on franchise valuations and infrastructure, not sentiment, with two exits pending and a second NWSL bid in progress.
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