Issa Rae backs Unrivaled as league hits $650M valuation. Published by Clare Adamson at October 21, 2026 Award-winning producer, actress, and entrepreneur Issa Rae has invested in Unrivaled, a player-owned women's basketball league. The league recently reached a $650 million valuation after raising more than $100 million in an oversubscribed Series C round. Founded in 2023 by WNBA stars Napheesa Collier, Breanna Stewart, and Alex Bazzell, Unrivaled gives elite players a domestic offseason alternative to overseas leagues while offering six-figure salaries and equity in the company. Rae joins an investor roster that includes Stephen Curry, Coco Gauff, Serena Williams, and Carmelo Anthony as the league continues its rapid growth. What is Unrivaled? The WNBA has long faced standing criticism for poor player compensation. Players have historically received between 9-22% of total league revenue, while NBA players receive roughly 50%. During the offseason, WNBA players have often played for international clubs in countries like China, Russia, and Turkey to supplement their income. Playing year-round can lead to physical fatigue and increase injury risks. Additionally, WNBA rules have penalized some players for arriving late to training camp because of overlapping overseas commitments. Collier's husband, a prominent basketball trainer, Alex Bazzell, helped develop the idea for a 3v3 league, which Collier and Stewart co-founded. Instead of waiting for traditional structures to pay the players what they deserved, they built a player-owned league from scratch. Unrivaled is a professional, player-owned women's basketball league, featuring an elite pool of WNBA stars. The league offers players six-figure minimum salaries, which Unrivaled described as the highest average salary in professional women's sports when it launched. The co-founders wanted to create a player-owned league, and so Unrivaled also offered all 36 inaugural players equity in the league. But they didn't stop there. In the first league year in 2025, Unrivaled provided players with two-bedroom apartments five minutes from the main facility at no extra cost. Players also had access to a personalized chef, state-of-the-art weight and training rooms, a glamour room, and a content creation room. The game format differs from the WNBA 5v5 play and the Olympic 3v3 half-court rules. Unrivaled's 3v3 format is designed for fast-paced, high-scoring games that give players room to showcase their skills and personalities. Games feature three seven-minute quarters, followed by a fourth quarter with a target score rather than a fixed time limit. Instead of a 24-second shot clock, Unrivaled features an 18-second shot clock, encouraging rapid decision-making and non-stop action. Top stars like Kelsey Plum, Aliyah Boston, Brittney Griner, and Angel Reese have all joined. Other notable players include Paige Bueckers, Rickea Jackson, and Cameron Brink. Investors behind a growing league. Collier and Stewart knew they needed substantial funding to convince players to skip lucrative overseas contracts. Instead of pursuing traditional sports funding, they directly pitched to high-profile investors and other athletes who understood the importance of equity in women's sports. Unrivaled brought in former ESPN president John Skipper and former Turner Broadcasting president David Levy. These executives did more than invest; they also brought industry expertise to the league's media rights negotiations and sponsorship sales. The league's star-studded investor lineup includes celebrity athletes like Serena Williams, Michael Phelps, Stephen Curry, Coco Gauff, and Carmelo Anthony. In May 2024, Unrivaled announced an oversubscribed seed round. By December, its combined seed and Series A funding had reached $35 million. The numbers show that the league is scaling quickly. In its second season, ticket revenue rose 204%, and ticket sales jumped 249%. A game in Philadelphia drew 21,490 fans, a record for a professional women's basketball game. A Brooklyn stop also sold out, with 18,261 fans in attendance. The league's commissioner said revenue hit almost $45 million this year, up from $27 million in 2025. Issa Rae's investment. In August, Unrivaled announced an oversubscribed Series C round that exceeded its initial $100 million target. Ten Pillar Sports Fund, backed by UC investments, led the raise. The deal valued the league at $650 million, nearly double its $340 million valuation in September 2025. The league's player equity pool is now valued at nearly $200 million. Rae joined through this Series C round, although the announcement did not include the size of her stake. "Unrivaled speaks to me, and everyone who wants to set new standards, and what the league has done and continues to do for the best women's basketball players in the world is something I'm proud to invest in," Rae said in the announcement. "After experiencing Unrivaled firsthand last season, it was clear that they're building something special. I look forward to being part of the league's growth and success to come." Although Rae's roots are in entertainment, her investment in Unrivaled is part of a larger pattern. Earlier this fall, Rae joined the ownership group of the Los Angeles Orbit, a professional women's volleyball team in League One Volleyball. In February, she also became a club partner in Major League Soccer's San Diego FC, a men's professional soccer club. Rae's formidable background in entertainment and media has helped shape her investments in emerging businesses and industries. Her investment portfolio includes the skincare brand Topicals; she is co-owner of Hilltop Coffee + Kitchen in Inglewood and a partner in the natural haircare line Sienna Naturals. Across beauty, entertainment, tech, and now sports, Rae is investing in brands with ambitions to drive innovation and social impact. Join the UrbanGeekz community for the latest in tech, innovation, entrepreneurship, culture, and opportunities. Subscribe here.

Emerging leagues have a two-year window to build their evidence base. Don't waste it. GSIQ THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SERIES · PART 2 OF 3 The North American sports market is experiencing a particularly active period of property creation and reinvention. TGL has tested a new prime-time golf format, the PWHL has built substantial momentum in attendance, and Unrivaled has successfully launched a differentiated 3-on-3 basketball property. Each faces the same early-stage challenge that confronts every new league or event: how do you show that early interest can turn into durable value before you have much of a track record? After 19 years building and leading research functions across governing bodies and sports organizations, I have reached a clear conclusion: the opening seasons are not merely a growth phase. They are also a limited opportunity to build the evidence base that later commercial decisions will depend on. Properties that do this well enter future discussions about sponsorship, media, investment, and expansion with more than ambition. They have evidence. Without it, early enthusiasm may be easy to see but much harder to value. Novelty creates an opportunity and a deadline A new property begins with something every established property would like to recover: novelty. Curiosity gets people to sample the product. Media outlets have a reason to pay attention. Sponsors may take meetings to get in early, stand apart from competitors, or secure favorable terms before the property grows. TGL's debut, for example, averaged 919,000 viewers on ESPN, with the audience exceeding 1 million at points during the broadcast. That was an encouraging signal - but it was also only a starting point. A debut audience tells you people showed up once. It does not tell you whether they will come back, pay, subscribe, recommend the property, or still care two seasons later. Novelty also fades. As a property moves beyond launch, stakeholders gradually stop asking, "What could this become?" and start asking, "What has it become?". Sponsors want to know what was delivered and how audiences responded. Media partners want evidence of repeatable viewership, audience composition, and room for growth. Investors want to know which early indicators are real and which were driven by launch attention. Host markets want to understand the local value created. Internal leaders need to know what is working, what is not, and where to allocate limited resources next. At that point, vision alone is no longer enough. The property needs a baseline, a trend line, and defensible targets. Some of that work cannot be recreated later. A property can estimate what happened during its first season, but it cannot go back and properly measure an audience, experience, or sponsor baseline that was never established. The window is not only metaphorical. It is a data-collection deadline. A launch number is not an evidence base Emerging properties naturally want research that produces strong headlines. Launches need attention, and compelling statistics can help generate it. But a launch announcement serves one purpose while an evidence base serves another. By the same token, an isolated number may describe the moment. But it rarely explains the business. So, a large opening audience does not tell you how many people returned. A sold-out event does not indicate whether demand can support additional markets or higher prices. Strong social engagement does not automatically translate into sponsor value. A favorable fan survey does not tell an investor whether the property has reached the people most likely to watch, attend, spend, or advocate for it. Early research should absolutely produce useful stories. Its larger purpose, though, is to create a consistent understanding of the audience, the product, and the value being delivered. For most emerging properties, four areas should form the foundation. Audience opportunity The first question is not simply, "How many fans can we claim?". It is, "Which audiences are genuinely available to us, and which of them matter commercially?" That means separating the theoretical market from the people who can realistically be reached, the people already showing interest, and the people demonstrating behaviors such as viewing, attending, purchasing, or recommending. It also means understanding who those audiences are - not only demographically, but in terms of their motivations, media habits, spending behavior, category interests, and connections to adjacent sports or entertainment properties. For a new property, audience composition can matter as much as audience size. A smaller but distinctive audience may offer sponsors and media partners something an established competitor cannot. Product-market fit Early attention tells you that people were willing to try the product. It does not tell you whether they will return. Emerging properties need to understand what drives repeat interest: * What attracted people in the first place? * Which elements of the format are working? * Does the live or broadcast experience feel meaningfully different? * What makes people want to watch, attend, subscribe, or buy again? * What is stopping interested consumers from taking the next step? * Are pricing, scheduling, access, or product design suppressing demand? This research should not exist only to reassure external stakeholders. It should improve the product itself. The earlier a property can distinguish between curiosity and genuine attachment, the better positioned it is to invest in what will actually support growth. Commercial delivery Sponsors and commercial partners eventually want evidence of what they received, not just what the property hoped to deliver. That evidence should go beyond logo exposure. Depending on the partnership, it may include visibility, awareness, sponsor attribution, brand fit, audience engagement, consideration, hospitality value, content performance, business-to-business opportunities, and other agreed objectives. Not every outcome can be directly attributed to a sponsorship, especially in an inaugural season. The work needs to match the quality of the available data and avoid claiming causation where the evidence only supports association or directional movement. Even so, an early-stage property can still define what success should look like, establish baseline measures, and document what was delivered. That changes the renewal conversation. Instead of trading selective highlights and general enthusiasm, both sides can discuss performance against an agreed-upon framework and what should happen next. Broader stakeholder value A sports property can create value beyond its direct audience and commercial partnerships. Depending on the model, that may include visitor spending, venue utilization, destination visibility, community participation, local business activity, or broader civic and cultural benefits. These outcomes matter because they reach stakeholders who may not respond to a traditional marketing deck: tourism authorities, city governments, venue operators, economic-development organizations, and prospective host markets. Economic-impact figures should always be handled carefully. Assumptions about visitor status, displacement, spending, and attribution can materially change the result. Inflated numbers may create a headline, but they can also damage credibility when reviewed by people who know how these studies work. The goal is not to produce the biggest possible number. It is to produce a number that can survive scrutiny. If you want to find out more about how research can give your property or event the best chance of prospering, please get in touch. Nicole Hollomon is Managing Partner, United States, at GSIQ, a global research and insights agency specialising in intelligence analysis for the sports, sponsorship and tourism industries. She previously served as Director of Research at YouGov Sport, Managing Director of Research at USA Football, and Associate Director of Research at the NCAA. GSIQ brings deep expertise and global perspective to North America - supporting leading rights holders, brands and tourism organisations across the region with insight that matches its pace, scale, and commercial ambition.