VC Kara Nortman bet early on women’s sports, and now she’s creating 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’s reshaping how investors think about women’s sports.

Despite its lackluster on-field performance, Angel City itself has become a case study (including literally, inside Harvard Business School) in how to best construct a women’s sports property. The team’s celebrity ownership group, including Natalie Portman and Serena Williams, has helped generate nearly unprecedented buzz. The franchise has also been savvy about sponsorships, breaking records before players kicked a ball.

“We went from zero to $30 million in revenue. We sold out games. We built something people didn’t think was possible,” Nortman reflected in an interview last month, pointing to Angel City’s commercial success from the very outset of the team’s formation. “That really led to the formation of Monarch.”

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

The fund now holds stakes in three other National Women’s Soccer League clubs: San Diego Wave, Boston Legacy FC (debuting next year), and its newest investment, announced earlier this month, FC Viktoria Berlin. The deal for 38% of the German club, makes Monarch the first foreign investor to acquire a stake in a German women’s soccer team.

It’s a diverse collection that reflects Nortman’s conviction that women’s sports have reached an inflection point, regardless of any single team’s fortunes. The numbers support her optimism, too.

“The overall men’s sports market globally is estimated to be about half a trillion dollars,” Nortman explains. “The women’s sports market, when we started Monarch in 2023, was thought to be about half a billion dollars. It’s now closer to $3 billion.”

Tapping into that growth requires a different playbook than men’s sports, Nortman says. It’s not a simple rinse-and-repeat. “Like, how many men’s team owners are thinking about parachuting Sephora boxes from rafters? Or having at [a New York] Liberty [WNBA game] a Fenty cam for putting on your [Fenty] lipstick, or Angel City having a Hello Kitty collab night where people can’t figure out how to get their hands on the merch before it sells out?”

Angel City’s innovative approach to marketing and partnerships helped it build so much excitement that in the fall of last year, 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 Nortman, who left Upfront Ventures and more traditional venture capital to focus full-time on women’s sports, Angel City’s commercial achievements have continued to validate Monarch’s thesis. Though there’s current tension – certainly in the sports press, at least – between Angel City’s business success and its on-field performance, the team has inarguably proven that women’s sports can generate serious revenue with the right pieces in place.

Now, as with any successful new endeavor, the question is: can the momentum last? Nortman is acutely aware that women’s sports has seen promising moments evaporate before. She frequently references a striking historical parallel from 1920, when 60,000 people showed up in Liverpool, England, to watch the Dick, Kerr Ladies play football, which is a bigger crowd than most Premier League games draw today. The next year, the English Football Association banned women from playing, and the sport essentially disappeared for decades.

“Everyone gets to wake up and become the discoverer of women’s sports when they do,” Nortman says. “But it takes consistent, hard work to get that to play out into consistency.”

That hard work, she argues, requires more than just riding waves of attention from breakout stars like Caitlin Clark or Angel Reese. It demands systematic investment in infrastructure, governance, and operations – the unglamorous work of building sustainable businesses.

This is where Monarch’s approach diverges from typical venture capital. Rather than making passive bets on dozens of startups, Monarch is taking concentrated positions in a handful of teams and leagues, then getting deeply involved in operations. The fund describes its strategy as “venture-like markets” with “growth equity or private equity-like” risk management.

“We show up alongside control owners and add a lot of operational value,” Nortman explains. The goal is to help teams reach breakeven or profitability on their core operations, positioning them to benefit as higher-margin media revenue grows.

Monarch’s investment interest extend beyond soccer. The fund is more broadly focused on what Nortman calls sports with “no product-market risk,” meaning established formats with proven audiences.

“Is this a sport people like to watch on their computer or television?” she asks. “There are participatory sports, like pickleball, but are people going to sit home and create an event out of watching it?”

Indeed, while Monarch has stakes right now in four “football” clubs, it’s interested, too, in women’s basketball, golf, and tennis – sports with substantial media revenue potential, along with existing infrastructure.

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

“When we started raising the fund, nine out of 10 conversations were, ‘Yeah, we don’t think [women’s] basketball is really a thing,’” Nortman says, recalling a “lot of skepticism around it.” Then came Caitlin Clark’s meteoric rise, the WNBA’s record-breaking viewership, and suddenly basketball became the hottest sector in women’s sports.

That growing interest validates Nortman’s thesis that women’s sports investment isn’t about finding the single perfect team but about supporting an ecosystem where multiple franchises can thrive. Some will win championships. Some will struggle competitively but succeed commercially. The key is having enough capital and operational expertise distributed across the market to weather individual setbacks.

Already, Angel City appears to be inspiring other ownership groups. “You started having other teams – Kansas City, Bay FC, Washington D.C. Spirit – with female-led ownership groups come in and show they could build a real P&L,” Nortman notes. Whether intentionally or not, Angel City became a template.

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

The key, she argues, lies in the fundamentals: strong league governance, owner commitment, infrastructure investment, and building genuine community connections. Media attention creates opportunity; operational excellence makes it sustainable.

“Every spike is an opportunity to create a consistent experience around it,” Nortman says. “You have to look at all the underlying criteria to see where it’s likely to stick around.”