Brady-Backed Media Company Raises $50M

Tom Brady’s NFL career isn’t over, but his entertainment endeavors are expanding.

Religion of Sports, the media company founded by Brady, NFL Hall of Famer Michael Strahan, and filmmaker Gotham Chopra, has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round, bringing the company’s total funding to $66 million.

• Shamrock Capital led the round with participation from Cerro Capital, Elysian Park Ventures, and Advancit Capital. The latter two were also part of the company’s $13 million Series A round.
• A valuation was not announced, but CEO Ameeth Sankaran said that reports that the company was now worth $100 million were “far low.”

“What Shamrock brings is a level of operational depth and experience in the media space that we don’t necessarily have on our current senior team or board,” Sankaran told Front Office Sports.

Creative Edge

“We feel like relative to our competitors, we’re differentiated by being a creator-friendly place,” said Sankaran. He added that some of the fresh capital could go toward “acquiring businesses that have a similar creative point of view and voice.”

Religion of Sports has partnered with Netflix, ESPN, Showtime, Apple+, and Amazon, among others. The funding round could help the company take more creative control over its content.

“We’re working with a particular athlete, for example, and invest in two years of filming great content, and then have something that we’re really proud of that we bring to market and have a lot of control over the shape and creative narrative,” said Sankaran.