Serena Williams Is Quietly Becoming One of Tech’s Most Influential Investors
Serena Williams Is Quietly Becoming One of Tech’s Most Influential Investors
Sports - November 22, 2025
With a $111M fund and a portfolio of cultural and tech unicorns, Serena is reshaping who gets funded in Silicon Valley.
Most people think Serena Williams retired from tennis in 2022. She didn’t. She simply moved the arena. No baseline, no chair umpire — just founders, capital, and the ruthless math of early-stage venture. And somehow, she’s just as formidable here.
The shift didn’t begin with a press release. It began with a statistic she couldn’t shake: less than two percent of venture funding goes to women. She thought it had to be wrong. When it wasn’t, she decided the only way to change the number was to become the one deciding where the money went. That was the spark behind Serena Ventures, long before anyone outside the industry knew it existed.
By the time she introduced the firm publicly, she’d already built a quiet angel portfolio that would make most established VCs flinch — MasterClass, Impossible Foods, Noom, Tonal, Esusu, Daily Harvest. These weren’t celebrity dabble deals. They were early, sharp, conviction bets on founders who weren’t getting the attention they deserved. Serena didn’t arrive in venture asking for credibility. She earned it before she even raised a fund.
In 2022, she launched her first institutional vehicle: a $111 million early-stage fund with an LP base that looked radically different from the Silicon Valley norm. Nearly half of her investors were women or people of color — a mirror image of the very founders the industry historically ignored. That wasn’t a marketing angle. It was Serena reframing who gets to be in the room.
Serena Ventures didn’t chase hype cycles. It backed companies redefining healthcare, fintech, food tech, education, climate, and consumer behavior. And the performance followed. Depending on the source, the portfolio now touches fourteen to sixteen unicorns — an absurd number for a debut fund and almost unheard of for a firm led by someone the tech world once assumed would be a tourist.
The key is that Serena never pretended to be the partner grinding through spreadsheets at 2 a.m. She hired Beth Ferreira — a respected operator and investor — to run the firm day-to-day. Serena didn’t want a vanity project. She wanted a functioning institution. She understood that her instinct and pattern recognition needed to sit on top of operational discipline. It’s the same way she approached tennis: build the right team, trust the experts, and focus on the big picture.
Her competitive brain translated smoothly into venture. She talks about founders with the same clarity she once used to break down opponents — where they bend, where they hold, what they’re made of when the match hits deep waters. Investors love to talk about grit, resilience, focus. Serena turned those words into a global career, and now into an investment framework.
And she hasn’t stopped at startups. She has quietly assembled a sports-ownership portfolio that doubles as a long-term bet on the future of women’s leagues and sports-tech infrastructure: the Miami Dolphins, Angel City FC, the Los Angeles Golf Club, and now Toronto’s new WNBA franchise. She’s not collecting teams for prestige. She’s building a presence across the very sectors — sports, media, community — that will define the next decade of cultural economics.
Serena Ventures has become a force field. Founders want her on the cap table. LPs treat her like a serious allocator. Boards want her perspective because she understands both competition and brand at a cellular level. She didn’t enter Silicon Valley to be a symbol. She came to build power.
People still call her the greatest athlete of all time. And that’s true. But what’s emerging now is something different: a woman constructing her own financial infrastructure in an industry that never expected her to show up — and certainly didn’t expect her to win.
Serena didn’t leave competition behind. She just changed the scoreboard.
And she’s dominating this one, too.
