VC Kara Nortman made an early bet on women’s sports, and now she’s building the market

When its season ended early this month, Angel City FC finished 11th out of 13 teams, a disappointing result for the Los Angeles soccer franchise that venture capitalist Kara Nortman co-founded in 2020. But the season’s struggles tell only part of a much larger story that is reshaping how investors think about women’s sports.

Despite its lackluster performance on the field, Angel City itself has become a case study (including within Harvard Business School) in how best to build women’s sports ownership. The team’s celebrity ownership group, including Natalie Portman and Serena Williams, has helped generate almost unprecedented buzz. The franchise has also been smart with sponsorships, breaking records before the players even kick a ball.

“Our revenue went from zero to $30 million. We sold out every game. We built something that people didn’t think was possible,” Northman said in an interview last month, pointing to the commercial success Angel City has enjoyed since the team’s inception. “This truly led to the formation of the Monarch.”

That commercial success, not accolades, has become the blueprint for Monarch Collective, a $250 million fund Nortman is launching in 2023., Which became the first investment vehicle to focus exclusively on women’s sports. While its origin story may be rooted in a team that has yet to win a playoff game, the Monarch’s portfolio and influence has expanded far beyond the Angel City training facility in Thousand Oaks, California.

The fund now has stakes in three other National Women’s Soccer League clubs: the San Diego Wave, Boston Legacy FC (which will debut next year), and its latest investment, announced earlier this month, FC Viktoria Berlin. 38% deal from the German club, It makes Monarch the first foreign investor to take a stake in a German women’s football team.

It’s a diverse group that reflects Northman’s conviction that women’s sports have reached an inflection point, regardless of any team’s fortunes. The numbers also support her optimism.

“The total global men’s sports market is estimated at half a trillion dollars,” Northman explains. “When we started Monarch in 2023, the women’s sports market was thought to be around half a billion dollars. Now it’s closer to $3 billion.”

Capitalizing on that growth requires a different playbook than men’s sports, says Northman. It’s not a simple rinse and repeat process. “Like, how many men’s team owners would consider parachuting Sephora boxes from the rafters? Or do it.” [a New York] Freedom [WNBA game] A Fenty camera to put on your device [Fenty] Lipstick, or is Angel City having a Hello Kitty collab night where people can’t figure out how to get the merchandise before it sells out?

Angel City’s innovative approach to marketing and partnerships has helped build so much excitement that last fall power couple Bob Iger and Willow Bay acquired a majority stake in it for $250 million, making it the most valuable women’s sports franchise in the world.

For Northman, who left Upfront Ventures and traditional venture capital to focus full-time on women’s sports, Angel City’s business accomplishments continue to validate Monarch’s thesis. Although there is current tension — certainly in the sports press, at least — between the Angel City’s commercial success and its on-field performance, the team has proven indisputably that women’s sports can generate significant revenue with the right pieces in place.

Now, as with any successful new endeavor, the question is: Can this momentum continue? Nortman is keenly aware that women’s sports have seen promising moments evaporate before. She often points to a striking historical parallel dating back to 1920, when 60,000 people came to Liverpool, England, to watch Dick Kerr’s women’s team play football, an audience larger than most Premier League matches today. The following year, the English Football Association banned women from playing sports, and the sport disappeared for decades.

“Everyone should wake up and become discoverers of women’s sports when they do this,” Northman says. “But it takes hard, consistent work to achieve consistency.”

She believes that this hard work requires more than just riding waves of attention from rising stars like Kaitlyn Clarke or Angel Reyes. It requires systematic investment in infrastructure, governance, and operations – the unglamorous business of building a sustainable business.

This is where Monarch’s approach differs from typical venture capital. Instead of passively betting on dozens of startups, Monarch takes concentrated positions in a few teams and leagues, then gets deeply involved in operations. The fund describes its strategy as “venture-like markets” with “growth equity or private equity” risk management.

“We show up alongside the control owners and add a lot of operational value,” Northman explains. The goal is to help teams reach a break-even or profitable point in their core operations, making them able to capitalize on higher-margin media revenue growth.

Monarch’s investment interest extends beyond football. The fund focuses more broadly on what Northman calls “non-product market risk” sports, that is, established formats with proven audiences.

“Is this a sport that people like to watch on their computers or TV?” she asks. “There are participatory sports, like baseball, but are people going to sit at home and create an event by watching them?”

While Monarch now has stakes in four football clubs, it is also interested in women’s basketball, golf and tennis – sports with great potential for media revenue, alongside existing infrastructure.

The company’s current limited partners include Melinda French Gates, former Netflix executives, and other wealthy individuals, and interest in its mission appears to be growing. For one thing, Monarch’s $250 million debut fund is far more than the $100 million that Nortman and her co-founder Yasmine Robinson, a former investor at sports, media, gaming and fitness-focused Causeway, initially planned to raise. She says the increased volume reflects the rapid maturation of the market during Monarch’s fundraising period.

“When we started fundraising, nine out of 10 conversations were, ‘Yes, we don’t believe [women’s] “Basketball is a really real thing,” Northman says, recalling “a lot of skepticism around it.” Then came Kaitlyn Clark’s meteoric rise, she broke the Women’s Basketball Association’s viewership record, and suddenly basketball was the hottest sector in women’s sports.

This increased interest validates Northman’s thesis that investing in women’s sports is not about finding one perfect team, but rather about supporting an ecosystem in which multiple franchises can thrive. Some will win championships some will struggle competitively but succeed commercially. The key is having enough capital and operating experience distributed across the market to overcome individual setbacks.

Already, Angel City seems to be inspiring other ownership groups. “I’ve started to put together other teams — Kansas City, BayFC, the Washington D.C. Spirit — with female-led ownership groups that show they can build a real P&L,” Nortman notes. Whether intentionally or not, Angel City has become a model.

With women’s sports entering what looks like a sustained boom period — the Golden State Valkyries just played their first WNBA championship next season, the NWSL is expanding, and media rights deals are growing — Nortman remains cautiously optimistic about whether this moment will differ from past surges in interest.

The key, she says, lies in the fundamentals: strong league management, owner commitment, investment in infrastructure, and building real community connections. Media attention creates opportunities; Operational excellence makes it sustainable.

“Every elevation is an opportunity to create a consistent experience around it,” says Northman. “You have to look at all the basic parameters to see where it’s likely to continue.”