Tennis to VC: Serena Williams’ investing career has already taken off

Serena Williams is giving up tennis to focus on, in her words, “expanding” her family and growing her other career– startup investing. While the 23-time Grand Slam champion’s — arguably the greatest in the Open era — exit from the tennis arena can easily be termed the end of an era, her keen interest in tech and venture capital is worth cultivating. 

Williams has gone on record to say that that is what had got her talking to her husband and Reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian back in the days. “I’ve always been fascinated with technology, and I’ve always loved how it really shapes our lives,” she had told NYT earlier this year. 

Serena Ventures, the micro-VC fund she co-founded in 2014 with Alison Rapaport Stillman (ex-JPMorgan), already has more than 60 portfolio companies, including 16 unicorns. Williams, in fact, wrote one of the first cheques for edtech giant MasterClass. Both Williams and Stillman serve as founding partners of the San Francisco-based company.

Earlier in March 2022, Serena VC raised its inaugural fund with a corpus of $111 million to invest in early-stage startups that have founders from diverse and under-represented backgrounds. The fund’s limited partners (LPs) include Norwest Venture Partners, Capital G (Alphabet’s growth fund), LionTree LLC, Kapor Foundation, and other HNIs.

While being under-represented is not mandatory to get a cheque from Williams and her partner, more than three-fourths of Serena VC’s portfolio companies currently fall in that category.

In a moving essay for Vogue, wherein she announced her retirement, Williams revealed that her fund seeks out women and/or Black founders. “78 per cent of our portfolio happens to be companies started by women and people of colour, because that’s who we are,” she wrote. 

She went on to share how being at a startup conference years ago opened her eyes to the wide disparity between funding for women-led startups and those run by their male counterparts. Sample this: female founders raised only 2 per cent of venture funding in 2021, according to Crunchbase. That number dropped from 2.3 per cent in 2020. 

“I kind of understood that someone who looks like me needs to start writing the big cheques. Sometimes like attracts like. Men are writing those big cheques to one another, and in order for us to change that, more people who look like me need to be in that position, giving money back to themselves,” Williams explained in her piece.

Her fund has invested across sectors, including consumer products, fintech, NFTs, education tech, health and fitness, talent marketplaces, and more. Williams is also passionate about growing her presence in African startups. “I'm a big believer in having Black people invest in Africa. That's really important to me,” she told Inc magazine last month.

Here’s a look at some of her key startup bets so far.

Serena’s Top 5 Investments

MasterClass (edtech)

 

MasterClass is a subscription-based learning platform that offers video-based vocational courses. Users can take up interactive courses across a wide range of subjects, including arts and entertainment, business, design and style, sports and gaming, writing, and so on. The Bay Area-based startup is currently valued at over $10 billion and has raised nearly half a billion in VC funding so far, as per Crunchbase.

 

Sorare (NFT)

The French NFT startup is one of the leaders in the segment. Last year, it raised a huge $680 million round from SoftBank Vision Fund, valuing it at $4.3 billion. It was the fifth largest ever funding round in the crypto industry. Sorare offers fantasy soccer NFT games, where users can buy digital cards registered on the Ethereum blockchain and add them to their collection. Williams backed Sorare in 2021 and joined its board as an advisor in 2022. She sees the platform as a “new revenue stream for female athletes” and a huge opportunity in women’s sports.

 

Daily Harvest (F&B)

Daily Harvest, which turned unicorn in 2021, specializes in frozen-food products such as smoothies, soups, bowls, lattes, and other healthy breakfast options. It offers subscription-based food delivery services to consumers and aims to grow beyond online to physical retail stores as well. Besides Wiliams, the NYC-based startup also counts celebs like Gwyneth Paltrow among its investors. It has raised capital of over $120 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

 

SendWave (fintech)

SendWave (later spawned off as Wave) enables easy and safe international remittances from North America and Europe to developing markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Founded in 2014, the fintech startup’s mission is to make sending money as seamless as a text message. It has over 800,000 users on its app and is currently valued at $1.7 billion. Besides Williams, its top investors include payments giant Stripe, Sequoia Heritage, Y Combinator, and Khosla Ventures, among others

 

Karat (cloud/HR)

Karat is one of the latest investments of Williams. The cloud-based platform helps Black engineers improve their technical interview skills to succeed at hirings. Their end goal is to improve the representation of Black engineers (currently at 5 per cent) in the US software industry. Prominent companies, including Amex, Roblox, Intuit, and others use Karat’s solutions for hiring quality tech talent. The tennis legend has extended her support to Karat’s mission of training over 100,000 new Black engineers over the next decade.

  

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