Today we are excited to announce a $40 M financing for The Players’ Tribune, a sports media company founded by Derek Jeter in 2014.

Derek’s vision was to create a media company that focused uniquely on the needs of athletes and fans, and he recruited an amazing group of athletes and entrepreneurs to his All-Star team. It has been an amazing experience watching our company grow from a small blog to THE trusted media platform for the athlete community, and we are thrilled to have IVP and Google as investors in our latest round.

In a world that is flooded with clickbait and fake news, The Players’ Tribune has differentiated itself by focusing on original, high quality, highly engaging content. We break critical news and celebrate human achievement through sports, but more importantly we tell the stories that are left untold by traditional media outlets. I am perhaps most proud of our athletes and editors who have taken bold positions on issues such as domestic violence, racism, and gender discrimination. These stories require courage and conviction, and have had meaningful impact well beyond the sports world. We are one of many important companies trying to re-build the media industry around authenticity and trust, and would not be able to do so without our amazing team and the faith of our >1,200 athlete contributors.

The media world has undergone a dramatic shift over the course of the last decade, and the $40 billion sports media market is (finally) undergoing its transition from traditional to digital distribution. This tectonic shift creates huge opportunities for new entrants to compete for audience and market share in one of the most of the valuable and largely untapped markets for start-ups. Congrats to the team at The Players’ Tribune and stay tuned for more from us – we are just getting started!