Tennis superstar Serena Williams has been quietly building a venture capital portfolio since 2014, amassing investments in more than 30 startups with an accumulated market cap of $12 billion. On Wednesday, she finally announced her business to the public.
Andela, the developer training and outsourcing company with operations in four African countries, already has a high-powered roll call of investors including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and a former US vice president.
Now it surprising turn of events, Serena Williams, the 23-time tennis Grand Slam champion, is another.
Through Serena Ventures, an investment fund founded in 2014 and has remained secret until an Instagram post this week, Williams has backed 30 companies across e-commerce, fashion and social good.
Part of the company’s thesis, Serena wrote, is backing companies “that embrace diverse leadership, individual empowerment, creativity and opportunity.” And Andela ticks all of those boxes. With a diverse team of co-founders and executives and local lead directors in countries where it operates, Andela admits budding African developers into a highly selective program (it has an admission rate of 1%), trains them to become globally competitive and outsources them to global companies in need of development talent.
It’s a model that’s proven enough to win significant investor backing with Andela among the best funded start-ups in Africa. It’s $100 million Series D round, which Serena Ventures participated in earlier this year, is one of the largest ever single rounds raised by an African-focused tech company and brought the total venture funding raised by the company to $180 million.
Alongside Andela, Serena Ventures has also backed Coinbase, the San Farancisco-based cryptocurrency exchange, Masterclass, the online learning platform and Wave, a remittance service that’s available in five African countries.
SportTechie Takeaway
Powerhouse athletes continue to break new ground in technology and investment. Williams is among many top-tier athletes that have partnered with VCs, launched their own investment companies, or individually invested and/or founded technology startups. A staunch advocate of women’s empowerment—Williams appeared in a Super Bowl spot for dating app Bumble earlier this year in which she encouraged girls to “make the first move … in work, in love, in life”—she joins such athletic greats as Kobe Bryant, via Bryant Stibel, and Magic Johnson, via Magic Johnson Enterprises, that own and operate their own venture capital firms.
