Editor’s Note
Welcome to Volume 23. Queue up the Bron vs. Jordan debate. Those who know me know there isn’t a debate. The GOAT is still out there doing it in Year 23.
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🎙 In the Pocket
How I am seeing the field across sports, media, entertainment, wellness and CPG
Mavericks fans brace your eyes. It’s March 2024. Mavs vs Jazz @ the American Airlines Center. Luka makes a great defensive hustle play. Flips it over his head to Kyrie pushing down court, who in one motion lobs it to a streaking Derrick Jones Jr. for the emphatic slam. Over 250 million Instagram views, more than 10 million likes. Just for this one clip from a regular season game.
No other vertical produces viral content like this. Sports is the pinnacle of an unscripted world that feels more and more automated every day. Moments like this dunk, a buzzer-beater or a walk-off aren’t just highlights, they are cultural events with lasting power. They spread instantly, organically, and globally and happen several times a week across every league and season. That’s the power of sports in a nutshell.
The data is staggering: the NBA generated 28 billion reel views in a single season, while the WNBA used short-form video to drive a 201% uptick in viewership. NASCAR pulled 40 million views and over a million likes from a clip of a pitstop gone wrong.
And yet, even with all of the eyeballs and attention, the money hasn’t caught up for the people creating and spreading it. Creators - or aggregators like the unavoidable Dov Kleiman on Twitter - often earn somewhere between $0.01 and $0.06 per 1,000 views on short-form platforms, well below what creators can make for long form videos (typically $1.00-$2.50 per 1,000 views). Rightsholders have watched third parties clip, repost, and monetize content while platform revenue-share arrangements remain a small slice of the distributional pie.
The attention economy is enormous, but three things are broken all at once:
Platforms undervalue content creators
Most leagues and teams currently lack the tools to capture creator-driven distribution
There’s little to no infrastructure for brands to activate in real time the moment something goes viral. That Luka clip hit 250 million+ views. Who exactly reaped those rewards? And how would you quantify that?
We are at an inflection point: Content is plentiful, audiences are active, global and growing. What is missing is the distribution layer - what will help campaigns move at the speed of a viral moment and track it all in a verified way that isn’t full of bots and other AI slop. This picks-and-shovels play for sports hasn’t been built yet, but we found somebody going for it.
I’ve been spending a ton of time looking into any and everything creator economy. If you are building in this space or have opinions, hit me up.
📺 The Watch List
A mini investment memo on the stars of tomorrow
The Company: Mimix
The Business in a tweet: Mimix is building the distribution layer for sports media - programmatic clipping campaigns that turn raw footage into viral reach, with AI verification and automated payouts built in. It’s an ad network for organic content
The 101:
Industry: AdTech, AI, Creator Economy
Headquarters: Wilmington, DE
Year Founded: 2024
Founding Team/Current Leadership:
Kyle Haener | CEO: Former senior sales rep at ServiceTitan — top 1% nationally, developing $500K+ ARR
Morgan Kuphal | CTO: former protocol engineer at Chainlink Labs — built Chainlink Functions
Jake Kenning | CPO: VP of Product Design at The Tie — 10+ years of experience leading product & UX
Employees: 6
Fundraising Status:
🔉 Pre-Seed Open: Raising $500,000 SAFE
If you’re interested in learning more, seeing the Mimix investor deck or meeting the team, respond to this email or reach out to [email protected].
Business Model:
Mimix wants to become Meta ads for organic content by enabling advertisers to run organic campaigns in the same seamless manner they run a Google or Meta campaign
35% take-rate on ad spend + Tiered SaaS for Vera Agent access
Traction:
Tunnl Labs' precursor product to Mimix (Tunnl App) has processed $800,000 in GMV and generated over $250,000 in revenue since July 2025. The Tunnl app is a creator ad network built on top of X (Twitter).
Tunnl is the MVP for what Mimix is becoming. Mimix is built on the same infrastructure as the Tunnl app. Mimix is the expansion to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube to capture the widely growing organic content market.
Mimix is currently pre-product with the beta MVP ready to go live next week
Deep Dive: Advertisers are shifting spend to organic content at a rate of 4x any other channel, but the infrastructure hasn’t kept up. Mimix is building the rails: campaign facilitation, compliance verification, fraud prevention, and automated stablecoin settlements to close the gap.
Why sports?
Athletes, teams, and leagues sit on practically infinite source content. That same footage broadcast once from a first-party account can reach exponentially more people with a coordinated clipping strategy behind it. The content already exists, Mimix just puts it to work.Example use case:
The SMU Mustangs allocate $100K for the 2026 season. Mimix deploys incentivized campaigns across a distributed network of fan and third-party accounts, clipping and distributing across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. At a $1.00 CPM, that's 100M+ views over a single season.
Pros:
$250K in revenue from the Tunnl precursor product with just 6 employees
Coinbase as an early partner validates enterprise appeal beyond sports
Management covers the full stack: sales, engineering, and product
Agentic advertising is an emerging category with few proven direct applications… Mimix is building one
zkTLS and TEE-based analytics verification solves the blackbox problem competitors haven't touched: real demographics, real retention, no bot views
Cons:
Platform dependency: an inherent structural risk. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram set the rules. Algorithm shifts or access restrictions aren’t hypothetical
Lack of verifiable analytics: Organic campaigns are a blackbox. Advertisers can only see surface level data such as likes, comments, views, and shares. They can’t see deeper level data such as audience demographics, retention rates, watch time & more. This leads to advertisers paying for fake views and views from demographics they don’t care about.
Check out how Mimix solves this: Mimix Analytics Verification Demo
Comparables:
Mimix Differentiator: There’s no main competitor and no one focused on dominating sports media. Whop’s Content Rewards is the current leader in short-form content campaigns (launched in January 2025) and they’re now processing $2-3 million per month in ad spend. Whop has the first mover advantage, but the platform UX and UI aren’t as developed - there’s little to no automation and no verifiable analytics. Mimix is building a solution to tackle the lack of automation, older UX and most importantly, solving the data problem so advertisers aren’t paying for bot views.
📶The Signal (No Huddle’s Take):
Clipping has already proven itself as a scalable distribution strategy. The biggest internet personalities were all built through fan-driven, viral clip culture. As AI makes content creation and distribution faster and cheaper, these modes of growth are only going to continue to accelerate. The category is real, but we don’t have a dominant player just yet.
Mimix’s early numbers are strong and prove the demand is there. To me, Mimix is a campaign and creator workflow tool with infrastructure ambitions. It boasts a clean UI that incorporates the key ingredients of any viral campaign: specific instructions, verified analytics, and measurable reach. The bigger play is what sits underneath - programmatic distribution layers that do not exist in other pockets of the market.
The upside inside sports specifically is interesting, and I really like how Kyle and the team are zeroing in on this vertical. At the pro level, I see Mimix as a way for athletes, teams and leagues to grow their personal brands through highlights, partnerships or viral content. It’s a structured way to meet their audience where they are already consuming.
Thinking about what’s next, I see a path for Mimix to enter the college world, partnering with athletic departments to help teams build and grow their digital footprint. Think about the ROI to a school (especially smaller ones) with a Sportscenter top 10 play or a Heisman candidate if they can funnel those views back to their own page and convert them into new fans, followers, customers or even future applicants. Mimix provides the ecosystem to help those campaigns happen at scale.
As with any early stage business, the concerns are there. Clipping as a category is still very much the Wild West - content rights and IP ownership can muddy the waters quickly, and platform dependency is a risk that never fully goes away. The Coinbase contract is proof of concept and a credibility anchor, but sports-first investors and rights holders may be wary about crypto’s translation into the sporting world. That’s a bigger question worth following closely.
The next 12 months will really shape the Mimix story: fundraise execution, customer growth and mix, and how traditional sports buyers engage with what Mimix is building. The infrastructure thesis is very compelling and the market timing feels right. It’s Mimix’s time to step up and secure ownership in the space.
If you’re interested in learning more, seeing the Mimix investor deck or meeting the team, respond to this email or reach out to [email protected].
From the archive
Back in Volume 2, we covered Opendorse and the infrastructure NIL unlocked for athlete-owned content. Mimix is the natural next layer — the distribution rails that turn that ownership into scaled, measurable reach.
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