Posted by Angus Gilmour • Posted on April 3, 2026
In 2026, female athletes are no longer just shaping sport through performance.
They are shaping it through ownership, infrastructure, and innovation.
What’s emerging is a clear shift: athletes are no longer waiting for women’s sport to be covered, protected, or properly understood – they are building the systems that do it themselves.
Across media, safety, performance, community, and health, a new generation of athlete-led startups is quietly redefining what the sports ecosystem looks like.
📣 Togethxr
One of the clearest signals of this shift is Togethxr, a media and commerce company focused on elevating women’s sports storytelling and culture.
It was co-founded by some of the most accomplished athletes in the world: Alex Morgan (football/soccer), Simone Manuel (Olympic swimming), Chloe Kim (Olympic snowboarding), and Sue Bird (WNBA basketball). All elite competitors who have operated at the highest level of global sport.
Togethxr is already establishing itself as a leading voice in women’s sport media, building both audience and commercial partnerships around a simple but powerful idea: women’s sport deserves its own narrative ecosystem.
Where it is heading is even more significant, toward a fully integrated media, commerce, and community platform that sits at the centre of women’s sport culture.
🛡️ NetRef Safety
While Togethxr focuses on visibility, NetRef Safety focuses on protection.
Founded by former college athletes Sarah Husain (water polo) and Shelby Perkins (soccer), the platform uses AI to help protect athletes, particularly women and LGBTQ+ players, from online abuse.
Both founders bring lived experience of what it means to be visible in sport at a young age, and how quickly that visibility can turn into vulnerability.
NetRef is currently building AI-driven tools that detect and reduce harmful online behaviour directed at athletes.
The long-term ambition is to become a core digital safety infrastructure layer for sport, embedded across teams, leagues, and platforms.
🏀 Ballin AI
A similar “system-level” rethink is happening in talent identification.
Ballin AI, founded by former college basketball player Nyla Pollard, is transforming how athletes are evaluated through film-based analysis and compatibility scoring.
Having experienced traditional scouting systems first-hand, Pollard built a platform designed to bring more structure and objectivity into recruitment decisions.
Right now, Ballin AI is being used to support early-stage talent evaluation, helping coaches and recruiters make more data-informed decisions.
The longer-term goal is to become a key decision layer in athlete recruitment pipelines, particularly across youth and college sport.
🌱 Mobius
Not all innovation is focused on elite performance.
Some of it is focused on how sport feels day to day.
Mobius, founded by former field hockey player Caroline Turnbull, is a social fitness platform designed to make training more connected, supportive, and human.
Instead of treating fitness as an isolated tracking experience, Mobius brings in community and shared progress as a core part of motivation.
It is currently positioning itself at the intersection of fitness tracking and social engagement, with early traction built around community-led training experiences.
Its longer-term vision is to become a global social fitness network, where training is as much about connection as it is about performance.
📱 Victra Sports
A similar community-first approach is emerging in media.
Victra Sports, founded by former soccer player Anna Smith-Malepeai, is building a digital home specifically for women’s sport fandom.
The platform brings together content, conversation, and community in one place – addressing a long-standing fragmentation in how women’s sport is consumed online.
At its current stage, Victra is focused on building early engagement and centralising audiences that are currently spread across multiple platforms.
Its ambition is to become the default digital destination for women’s sport fans globally, combining media and interaction in a single ecosystem.
🧬 Jennis
Perhaps the most structurally important innovation sits in women’s health and performance.
Jennis, founded by Olympic champion Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, focuses on hormonal health, cycle tracking, and female-specific performance insights.
Ennis-Hill’s own experience competing at the highest level highlighted a gap in how women’s performance was understood and measured.
Jennis is currently a venture-backed platform combining health data with personalised training insights tailored specifically to women.
Its long-term ambition is to become a global leader in women’s performance health technology, helping redefine how female athletes train, recover, and understand their bodies.
Final Thoughts
What connects these companies isn’t just that they are led or influenced by female athletes. It’s that they signal a shift in who is actually building the infrastructure of women’s sport.
For years, key parts of the ecosystem – media, safety, performance, health, and community – were designed without the lived experience of the athletes inside it. What we’re now seeing is a reversal of that model.
Female athletes are stepping into roles as builders, not just participants, shaping how sport is consumed, protected, analysed, and experienced.
And because these solutions come directly from lived experience, they are not abstract ideas, they are practical responses to real, long-standing gaps in the system. This isn’t just a wave of athlete entrepreneurship.
It’s the early stage of a rebuild of the sports ecosystem from within.