How to License Your Reputation Like a Pro Athlete |
How to License Your Reputation Like a Pro Athlete
Datavault AI is focused on expanding who can benefit from their own name, image, and likeness.
BY KOLAWOLE ADEBAYO, COLUMNIST
Illustration: Getty Images
When the NCAA finally gave college athletes the right to profit from their name, image, and likeness in 2021, it was a major sports story.
Four years later, the market had grown to roughly $2.6 billion, with nearly $1.8 billion reaching athletes directly. What started as a question about fairness in college sports has quietly turned into a working model for treating personal identity as a licensed, revenue-generating asset.
The infrastructure nobody built
The most visible beneficiary of that shift has been Opendorse, a Nebraska-based marketplace that now supports more than 150,000 athletes and has facilitated close to a billion dollars in NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) transactions. Built originally to help pro athletes manage endorsement deals, Opendorse pivoted hard to college athletes when the NCAA rule change opened the floodgates, and its model—connecting athletes with brands through a compliance-first marketplace—became the industry standard for transaction-level NIL.
To be sure, Opendorse is not the only company in this space. MOGL and Teamworks (formerly INFLCR) have built competing NIL marketplaces, and platforms like MarketPryce and NIL Club have carved out their own niches — making the transaction layer one of the most contested corners of the NIL economy.
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But Nathaniel Bradley, CEO of Datavault AI, was watching all of it and thinking about a different layer of the problem. Bradley had spent years at the intersection of patent development and data infrastructure, and the NIL market looked to him less like a sports windfall than a proof of concept—evidence that if you built the right system, one that let people formally claim their identity, license it with legal precision and collect revenue automatically, there was no obvious reason it couldn’t work for anyone whose name, expertise, or professional reputation carried commercial weight.
That premise shapes everything about how Datavault operates. The company trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker DVLT and holds over 70 issued and pending patents, primarily working through institutions such as universities, professional sports organizations, and alumni associations. The individuals within those organizations—athletes, credentialed professionals, and subject-matter experts—become the direct beneficiaries when their identities generate licensing revenue.
Bradley describes the starting point in straightforward terms. “The first place to start is claiming your likeness,” he says, explaining that Datavault’s VerifyU system formalizes that claim, then uses blockchain and smart contracts to meter, monitor, and distribute revenue across multiple parties at once when a name or credential generates commercial value.