A financial services executive who made hundreds of millions of dollars selling a payments firm in recent years has committed to invest in the Blue Owl NBA fund, according to a report.
Private equity and venture capital-focused Pitchbook reported Thursday that CapStone Holdings has committed to invest an undisclosed amount of money with the Blue Owl fund. CapStone is a Florida-based family office for Keith J. Stone, who invests in sports, global real estate and various technology companies. The CapStone webpage lists a $40 million investment with Blue Owl as a part of its investment portfolio, but that may not be all to the NBA fund: Blue Owl has very large real estate, corporate lending and private equity funds. Requests for comment to CapStone weren’t immediately returned. Blue Owl declined to comment.
The capital commitment should be a boon to the NBA fund, which originally was named Dyal Homecourt before the firm merged with another to form Blue Owl. The fund in 2020 was the first to gain NBA approval to take passive minority ownership stakes in franchises. While it fell short of its original goals of raising as much as $2 billion in capital its first year, the NBA fund today has about $645 million in assets. The fund reported about $500 million in assets a year ago upon profitably exiting the Phoenix Suns on that club’s sale to Mat Ishbia. The Blue Owl fund also has stakes in the Minnesota Timberwolves, Sacramento Kings and Atlanta Hawks.
Stone is a booster of the athletic department at Eastern Michigan University, from which he graduated in 1985, according to his LinkedIn page. He has given about $22 million to the school—mostly to its golf program—through GameAbove, a business and giving arm of CapStone. In May, Stone announced the formation of GameAbove Sports to focus on acquiring minority and majority franchise ownership and making sports technology investments. The company financed and co-produced a documentary on former NBA and ABA player George Gervin called Iceman, which ran on NBA TV last year, according to a press release.
Based on publicly available information, after a stint in GE Capital in the 1980s, Stone formed Corporate Spending Innovations, which offered payment solutions to corporate clients. That business was bought by French company Edenred in 2018 for $600 million. A separate arm of the business covering Brazil and Latin America was bought by GE in 1996. Stone also has investments that the CapStone webpage says are valued at more than $50 million apiece in cannabis products maker Curaleaf; Blackstone Private Credit; St. Louis mixed-use real estate development City Foundry; and Blaq Projects, a New South Wales, Australia, mixed-use real estate effort.
