Issa Rae has stopped waiting for anyone to cast her. She now holds ownership stakes in three professional sports leagues, and the newest of them is valued at $650 million.
Rae joined an oversubscribed funding round in Unrivaled, the three on three women’s basketball league founded by the players Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier, which was set the league’s valuation at $650 million. She invested alongside Carmelo Anthony, Coco Gauff, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Trae Young, among others. She already held a stake in the Los Angeles Orbit, a League One Volleyball team, and is a club partner in the ownership group of San Diego FC in Major League Soccer.
“Unrivaled speaks to me and everyone who wants to set new standards,” Rae said when the round was announced. “After experiencing Unrivaled firsthand last season, it was clear that they’re building something special.”
The pattern is worth naming because of what it is not. Rae is not fronting a campaign or lending a face to a launch. She is on the cap table, which is the side of the business where the decisions get made and the upside gets kept, and it is the side Black women are almost never on in professional sports. Three leagues is not a cameo.
Collier put the league’s own ambition plainly when the round closed. “From the beginning, our goal has been to raise the standard for what players and fans should expect,” she said.
Rae is also returning to HBO in 2026 with a half hour comedy pilot, five years after “Insecure” ended. The two halves of that sentence used to be the whole story about a woman like her: the show she makes and the show she is in. The leagues are the part that compounds after the cameras are off.
