Maria Sharapova, and the business of good taste

On her work with Amulet, Rove Concepts, and a second act built on very consistent instincts.

Maria Sharapova has always had a better filter than many athletes when it comes to business. Even during her tennis career, Sharapova was selective with endorsements, treating them like extensions of a broader brand she was already building.

That same instinct has carried into her second act, where she’s built out a portfolio of investments and partnerships that reads as a tightly edited point of view rather than a collection of random bets. So when it was announced this week that she had invested in Amulet, a new women’s wellness company incubated by Squared Circles—the brand incubator co-founded by her partner, Alexander Gilkes—it felt like a continuation of something she’s been doing for a while now, just with slightly better access.

Because the throughline across Sharapova’s investing is how rarely it feels off. She was early to Supergoop!, back when SPF hadn’t quite crossed over into lifestyle yet, and the brand has since become one of the clearest winners in that category, with Blackstone acquiring a majority stake in 2021 in a deal reportedly north of $600 million.

The rest of her portfolio follows a similar logic, with companies like Therabody, Bala, and Tonal—brands that have raised serious money and, at one point, defined their categories—that all fall into that group of things you technically buy for function, but also because they look good in your apartment. And when she steps outside of that space, into something like the egg freezing platform Cofertility or the consumer investing app Public.com, it still feels intentional rather than reactive, which is not something you can say about a lot of athlete-led investing.

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