Joe Montana is best known for winning four Super Bowls during the 1980s as the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, but he’s now cementing a new legacy as a top-tier investor.
Montana tops the list of celebrity VCs, recently released by CB Insights, with a whopping 569 deals since 2020, and he’s also managed to back 10 unicorn companies during that time frame. Montana is the founder and managing partner at Liquid 2 Ventures, a San Francisco-based VC fund. Actor Ashton Kutcher was a distant second place, with 118 deals and five unicorns backed, followed by the Chainsmokers, with 101 deals and three unicorns backed.
The list ranks 20 celebrity investors using a proprietary model called a “Mosaic score,” which ropes in total dealmaking activity, the number of unicorns in an investor’s portfolio, portfolio exits through mergers, acquisitions, and IPOs, and more. Here are the top 10 celebrity VCs from CB Insights’ list:
- Joe Montana
- Ashton Kutcher
- Chainsmokers
- Jay-Z
- Kevin Durant
- Mindy Kaling
- Robert Downey Jr.
- Will Smith
- Oprah Winfrey
- Josh Richards
These are far from the only celebrities involved in venture capital in recent years. Others include Serena Williams, who founded Serena Ventures, Snoop Dogg with Casa Verde Capital, and Steph Curry with SC30 and Penny Jar Capital. Williams and Snoop Dogg are also on CB Insights’ list, ranking at 17 and 11, respectively.
What’s also notable about CB Insights’ list is just how many professional athletes appear on it—six of the top 20 are or were professional athletes. Four of those are current or former professional basketball players. The NBA, especially, seems to be a hotbed of VC interest, and the league itself even launched its own investment arm, called NBA Equity, in 2022. The NFL followed suit with its own venture arm, called 32 Equity.
Even so, VC interest seems to be, at this point, mostly concentrated among NBA players, as Montana is the only NFL player to land among CB Insights’ top 20 this year.
Some well-known companies that these celebrities have backed include milk-alternative brand Oatly (Winfrey and Jay-Z), plant-based meat company Impossible Foods (Kaling), and grocery startup Misfits Market (Kutcher).
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