Through our Athlete Angels Fund™, we seek out and invest in the best startups with support from top-tier co-investors, including, you guessed it, professional athletes!

Besides their net worth, startups find great value in taking in athletes as part of their board of directors, advisors, or even co-founders by leveraging the player’s influence, brand legitimacy, knowledge, and connections.

Together our team has invested in over 50 startups (including a few unicorns) within the health & wellness, fintech, sports, and media verticles. We take great pride in working to close the equity gap between diverse founders and the venture capital industry.

Mike Fingado (ex-Amazon, former D1 Athlete, NFL agent) and Brian Dzingai (ex-Deloitte, IP consultant, 2x Olympian) have built up an extensive network within sports and tech from their past experience as both athletes and management consultants. In fact, they coined the term Athletepreneur® over 12 years ago and have been building a network of athletes interested in tech ever since. The Athlete Angels Fund deal flow comes from 29 other partner syndicates, top-tier accelerators, sports leagues, athletes, and founder referrals.

We have personally invested in 45+ startups (including some unicorns), within the health & wellness, fintech, sports, and media verticles. Many of these portfolio companies have raised additional funding from notable VCs: CapitalG, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Softbank Vision Fund, Tiger Global, Accel Partners, Tribe Capital, Seven Seven Six, etc.

A sampling of previous investments:

Fintech: Albert, Mercury, First Boulevard, ClearCo, Copper, Alt, Plastiq, Perch, Equi

Sports and Media: Overtime, WePlayed, Stagger, DNABlock, Slate

NFTs, Crypto: Abra, Creatify

EV's, Auto, Aerospace: NXCR, Tarform Motorcycles, SpaceX

Consumer: Spark Grills

Health and Wellness: Mello, Aescape

Food and Beverage: Ohzha, JuneShine, Moku Foods

We are Value Add Investors:

We leverage our relationships with leagues, teams, player’s associations, and talent agencies to help our portfolio companies build momentum behind their brand.

We maintain a close network of specialist and generalist investment firms that span from early to late-stage for co-investment and follow-on financings.

Important Notes:

• Early-stage investing is highly risky. Invest only if you are comfortable losing the entire investment
• Feel free to opt-out or opt-in on a deal by deal basis
• We will endeavor to provide updates when possible but cannot guarantee them
• When a deal has a tight deadline or I have a small allocation, allocation priority will be given to the most active LPs
• Mike will sit for the NFLPA agent certification exam in 2022, opening further access to the NFL and its players, but there is no guarantee that this access will lead to additional deal-flow.