Tristan Thompson Invested In Anthropic Early After Attending NBA Dinners And He Brought In His ‘Buddies To Make A Bigger Check’ – AfroTech
An NBA dinner led Tristan Thompson to invest in a major AI company.
In an interview on “Market Bubble,” Thompson, a fourth overall draft pick in 2011 who last played during the 2024-25 season, reflected on a specific time in the league that led him to strengthen his investment portfolio.
The unrestricted free agent recalled attending several dinners that gave him opportunities to sit down with individuals in Silicon Valley when playing against San Francisco’s Golden State Warriors. He heard discussions around the future of technology, particularly AI. That led him to invest early in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company that developed Claude and is currently in discussions to raise $30 billion at a $900 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg.
“I was like, ‘Hey, man, I like what you’re, what you’re talking about. You sound like you’re cool. You sound, like, transparent.’ … I’m like, ‘All right, man, here’s a check. I wanna get in the game.’ And then from there, they just opened up so much for me. But the cool thing was like I was able to like get in and like SPV (special purpose vehicle) early and like bring in all of my other buddies and make a bigger check.”
According to information shared with AFROTECH™, Thompson’s interests in AI are also being married with the sports world. On CoinMarketCap’s live podcast, he shared that AI has been used in nearly every sector of the world, but “it hasn’t touched sports as of yet.”
TracyAI
Now he is a co-founder of TracyAI, an AI-powered sports analytics agent intended to raise standards for how athletes train, perform, and engage with their fans. He also serves as its chief content officer and lead advisor, according to Sports Business Journal.
“Imagine in the palm of your hands having an app or a URL site where you can log in, you can push to talk, and she’s going to verbalize information to you right on the spot,” Thompson told the outlet. “And she [TracyAI] will have real-time analytics and stats.”
He later added, “That’s the cool thing about this AI technology. It can do things that an [analytics staffer] can’t do because they don’t have the time to go and grab all that information and curate it into a response.”
The outlet also notes that TracyAI is trained on available basketball data like stats and media coverage and can respond to speech and text queries.
