Earlier this year, TMRW Sports made headlines for its partnership with the LPGA to launch the Women’s TMRW Golf League, backed by Alex Morgan’s Trybe Ventures.

This week, they announced their partnership with the NFL for a new flag football league starting with $192M in funding, including $160M from external investors and $32M from the NFL. Though seemingly, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy (TMRW Sports founders) are not the only athletes venturing into new leagues in sports.

Current and former athletes are choosing to use their capital and brand to invest in their respective sports, as well as those that are emerging. These emerging professional sports, each with their niche audience and participants, are increasingly being seen as innovative long-term plays with the involvement of private equity firms, tech investors, and athletes.

Ultimately, many of these leagues are built to better support athletes who may only have competitive opportunities through events with larger barriers to entry like the Olympics. Institutional backing brings legitimacy and financial stability to these new leagues, while athlete investors help grow audience interest and public awareness.

With athletes external to the sport and institutional investors to support these leagues, their credibility feeds back into the value of their investment, aiming to generate more consistent opportunities for athletes to compete, earn, and build a career, inside and outside of their sport.

Recovery technology is deeply fragmented and honestly I am part of the problem. You can ask my wife. I own way too many recovery gadgets. Ice baths, saunas, Normatec, massage guns, BFR, float tanks. Where will it end? Each one takes time and is usually not cheap. Athletes are actually at the forefront of this craziness. Every locker room I have been a part of has tried stacking these for years. You throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. The problem is it's manual, expensive, and slow. You're scheduling multiple sessions, managing multiple devices, and hoping the combination does something better than the individual components alone.

I demoed the Ammortal Chamber recently. Full disclosure: I'm an investor, which is part of why I wanted to experience it firsthand. Three 15-minute sessions, two recovery-focused, one more energizing. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and left with some thoughts on where the recovery and optimization category may be headed. Ammortal has been in the news lately, and for good reason. Mike Trout, Freddie Freeman, and George Kittle are among the athletes who have recently joined as investors, alongside players from multiple MLB and NFL teams (Business Wire).

Ammortal's pitch is simple: one chamber, multiple modalities, 15, 25, or 50 minutes. Whether the science on simultaneous stacking fully holds up is still being studied. Most research is done on singular treatments, and it's genuinely hard to study combinations, especially when some protocols heat the body and others cool it, some enhance blood flow while others restrict it. Therabody acknowledged that no independent studies had examined pneumatic compression combined with vibration and LED light therapy before they ran their own internal study on the JetBoots PRO Plus (Therabody).

That's not necessarily a dealbreaker. The experience and the efficiency argument can carry a product far. You have heard this pitch before: instead of spending time and money on multiple protocols, buy the one product that does it all.

The efficiency argument holds water. Therabody is the clearest example. Their JetBoots PRO Plus combine wireless pneumatic compression, infrared LED light, and vibration in a single boot (Therabody). Their ThermBack LED stacks heat, far infrared, vibration, and near infrared light therapy into one wearable back wrap (Therabody). That's not one product. That's a strategy.

The sports recovery technology market sits around $3.1 billion today and is projected to reach $10.5 billion by 2033 (Futuredatastats). Facilities are spending on recovery infrastructure. Wellness spas are adding modalities to justify memberships. My question is whether a single device that consolidates the experience becomes the obvious winner.

Top performers have been trying to stack modalities for years. Products like the Ammortal Chamber are trying to systematize that instinct. Whether the science is fully settled is an open question, but consumer behaviors are already there. Biohackers, weekend warriors, and recovery enthusiasts are buying the feeling of having covered all their bases efficiently.

We recently shipped this dashboard for companies and it's played a small part in the partnership deals executed these past few weeks 👀

Our improved company dashboard allows companies track their meetings, messages, and basic analytics, including which athletes have viewed their profile.

It also can preview what your company looks like from the athlete's perspective.

We want to empower founders with as much insights as possible to see who is a fit to join their team.

Admittedly we've been very athlete-side heavy in terms of tools and features, but it takes two to tango. Excited to share more company-side features as we collect more data points on how to accelerate deal speed.

For Founders/CMOs wanting to learn more about the magic we've created, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Cob Foods makes sorghum-based, corn-free, gluten-free snacks and was co-founded by tennis star Novak Djokovic.

Why should athletes care?

Sorghum is an “ancient super-grain” which is slow digesting, helping provide steady energy throughout the day. Other ingredients like the prebiotic fiber supports gut health, supporting recovery, inflammation, and overall performance.

Watch our interview above with founder and CEO Jessica Davidoff to learn about how Novak Djokovic became a co-founder in the company and the role he plays to back the performance-focused nutrition over simple consumer snacking.