Michael Haddix Jr. spent the early part of his career advising people who can dunk for a living. At Octagon, his client roster reportedly included Devin Booker, Derrick White, and Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman [Entrepreneur, 2026]. Earlier, as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he advised athletes including Chris Paul, Stephen Curry, and Michael Phelps on the personal-finance side of sudden wealth [TechCrunch, 2026]. The pitch behind his New York-based startup, ELV8 Inc, is that the playbook he ran for nine-figure clients can be miniaturized, gamified, and shipped to a phone in the hands of a 19-year-old guard at a mid-major program.
That product is Scout. ELV8 operates it as an SEC-registered investment adviser offering investment management, advisory services, and financial planning tools [Scout]. The consumer-facing wedge is a thematic investing app aimed at Gen Z, letting users put money into baskets organized around recognizable cultural categories such as cars, food, and video games rather than tickers they have never heard of [TechCrunch, 2026]. The second wedge, and arguably the more defensible one, is a personal-finance product built specifically for college athletes managing income from sponsorship deals and Name, Image, and Likeness contracts [Business Insider, 2026].
The bet
The two wedges are really one bet: that a generation raised on group chats and Robinhood does not need another brokerage account, it needs a product that speaks its language and meets it at the moment money first arrives. For most Gen Z users, that moment is a part-time paycheck or a birthday transfer. For a growing cohort of NCAA athletes, it is a five- or six-figure NIL deal landing in a checking account that has never held more than rent money. ELV8's framing positions Scout as both a learning surface and a regulated adviser, an unusual combination. The company describes itself as an interactive learning platform making business and finance entertaining and accessible [VC DATALAB], while the legal disclosures on Scout's site make clear that the underlying entity is a registered investment adviser handling actual client assets [Scout].
Haddix has been building toward this for some time. Before ELV8, he founded Empower3d, which provided consulting and finance management classes to collegiate athletes [Times Union, 2026], and he is a former Siena basketball player himself [App Store]. His earlier banking experience also includes a stint at Lazard focused on mergers and acquisitions [Medium, 2026]. Cindy Zeng is named as a co-founder of Scout [Crunchbase].
Why it could be big
The NIL economy did not exist in any meaningful form four years ago. It now routes real money to tens of thousands of college athletes across hundreds of schools, and the financial services industry has noticed: athletic departments are increasingly treating financial education as part of the recruiting pitch [InvestmentNews]. Most incumbents are not built to serve an 18-year-old wide receiver with a $40,000 endorsement and no idea what a 1099 is. A registered adviser that already speaks to that demographic, and that has a content surface to teach as it onboards, has a credible shot at owning the category before a bank decides to.
The cap table suggests sophisticated investors see a similar shape. ELV8 raised a seed round of roughly $2.6 million led by Chingona Ventures [PRNewswire, Sportico]. The broader investor list includes Reach Capital, an education-focused firm, alongside Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and OnDeck [ZoomInfo]. The company also went through Techstars. The combination of an edtech investor and a media investor on the same cap table is unusual and tracks with the dual identity of the product: part curriculum, part brokerage.
Seed round (2023) | 2.6 | $M
The team and traction
Haddix is Co-Founder and CEO of Scout [TechCrunch, 2026]. His resume , Goldman Sachs, Lazard, Octagon, Columbia Business School MBA [TechCrunch, 2026] , is exactly the one a regulator and a compliance officer want to see on the founder of a registered investment adviser serving minors-turned-clients. The athlete relationships are not just marketing; they are distribution. A founder who has personally advised Stephen Curry has a different cold-open with a Power Five athletic director than a generalist fintech founder does. Co-founder Cindy Zeng rounds out the founding team [Crunchbase].
The honest counterfactual
What the bears will say: thematic investing for Gen Z is a crowded shelf, and the original wave of meme-adjacent investing apps has had a difficult time turning sign-ups into durable, fee-paying relationships. Scout's 2022 launch positioned it among a cohort of consumer fintechs chasing a young demographic that proved expensive to acquire and quick to churn [TechCrunch, 2026]. What the bulls answer: Scout is not really competing for the generic Robinhood user. The NIL wedge is a vertical with a captive distribution channel (athletic departments and agents), a clear compliance need, and a customer whose lifetime value scales with their earning curve. If even a modest share of Division I athletes onboard through school partnerships, the unit economics look very different from a pure consumer funnel. The dual identity as both registered adviser and learning product also gives ELV8 two ways to monetize a relationship that most consumer apps only get to monetize one way.
What to watch
The next twelve months will test whether ELV8 can convert its athlete-services niche into a repeatable enterprise motion: signed agreements with athletic departments, conferences, or NIL collectives that put Scout in front of rosters at scale. A Series A would be the natural next milestone given the 2023 seed, and the composition of any new lead investor will signal whether the market reads ELV8 primarily as edtech, fintech, or sports-tech. Watch also for product expansion beyond thematic baskets into the boring, sticky surfaces (tax, cash management, retirement) where athlete clients actually need help and where adviser fees compound.
The open question for readers: when an 18-year-old signs a $50,000 NIL deal next fall, who do you want sitting on the other side of the onboarding screen, a legacy wirehouse or the founder who used to run the spreadsheet for Steph Curry?