This edition of “Long Shot,” which explores athletes’ ventures off the field, is about former NFL player Ryan Mundy. Drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2008, he helped the team win the Super Bowl in his rookie season. During his successful eight-year NFL career, Mundy established himself as one of the best and hardest-hitting safeties in the league.
Since his retirement in 2015, Mundy’s success in the business world has been just as impressive as his work in the NFL. Mundy barely took a break after retiring, going straight into investing his funds into Bitcoin in 2016. He notably regrets pulling out of Bitcoin early, but the whole process helped him develop a love for investing.
In an attempt to better brand his investment activity, he founded Techlete Ventures in 2017 and began to invest his funds through this vehicle. In 2018, Mundy took a step back from investing to found SWZLE, a company that focused on the production of reusable straws. Mundy built it into a successful brand that was sold in many major retail stores throughout the country, and the success of the brand led it to be acquired in October 2020.
After selling SWZLE, Mundy moved on to a true passion project of his, establishing a technology platform that caters to the mental health needs of the Black community. This was a cause that hit close to home for Mundy, because he suffered from issues related to depression and anxiety towards the end of his NFL career and during the first portion of his retirement. All this resulted in the foundation of Alkeme Health in 2021, a platform currently under development that looks to address issues of mental health and wellness, particularly in the Black community.
Mundy is taking a slightly different route in building this company, as rather than bootstrapping the enterprise with his own funds, he opted for venture capital. In this method, private investors provide funds to the business in exchange for equity. Mundy said in a Game Plan podcast that venture capital is a sort of treadmill that can be difficult to get off of, but the scale that he hopes Alkeme Health will reach and the speed at which he hopes to get there requires private investments like venture capital. This injection of funds provided by venture capital has mainly been used to develop as effective a product as possible.
