Hector Rivas never planned to fix the sports industry. He planned to sell used books. For a decade, he served as the first CEO of ThriftBooks, the Seattle-area company that grew from a single storage unit in Kirkland, Washington, into one of the country’s largest used-book sellers, with ten distribution facilities across ten states by his account. It was the kind of success that could have been the end of the story. Instead, it was just the beginning of an unlikely second act. After ThriftBooks, Rivas founded EcoGoodz, a used-goods and overstock brokerage, and then in 2020 he co-founded Disruptive Sports Agency with agent Henry Organ. As an NFLPA-certified contract advisor, Rivas worked the business side of the agency, and that experience changed how he saw the world. He watched as agents, lawyers, CPAs, financial advisors, and marketing teams all tried to manage an athlete’s career using their own separate piles of emails, spreadsheets, and documents. Everyone around the player was working off their own version of the truth. The agent had one set of files. The lawyer had another. The CPA had a third. And the athlete, the person whose career all these professionals were supposed to protect, was the one absorbing the cost of that disconnect. Deals fell through the cracks. Decisions moved slowly. Money was lost, but so was something harder to measure: trust, clarity, and peace of mind. Rivas saw the problem up close, and he couldn’t unsee it. The solution, he decided, was not another app for agents or a better calendar for lawyers. It was a single shared workspace for everyone in an athlete’s orbit. That idea became Nukleus.
Nukleus, based in Issaquah, Washington, is what Rivas calls an operating system for the business of sports. It is not a highlight reel app or a social network for fans. It is the back office—the unglamorous but essential infrastructure that keeps a professional sports career from becoming a tangle of missed deadlines and conflicting information. The platform brings together everyone who matters in an athlete’s professional life: the agent, the lawyer, the CPA, the financial advisor, the marketing team, and the athlete themselves. Instead of each person maintaining their own private collection of documents and reminders, they all work from the same contracts, the same deadlines, and the same records. If the agent renegotiates a clause, the lawyer sees it immediately. If the financial advisor needs a tax document, it is already there. If the marketing team wants to know whether a sponsorship opportunity conflicts with a team contract, they can check before they pitch it. The product is currently in a free beta with about thirty users, including athletes, agents, agencies, lawyers, and marketing staff. Nukleus plans to charge $99 per user per month for a starter plan and $249 for a full-featured version, with custom enterprise pricing for larger organizations. Athletes themselves join for free. The company is also building AI tools designed to answer questions about contract terms and league rules, which could turn the platform from a shared filing cabinet into something closer to a knowledgeable assistant. The goal, Rivas says, is to make sure that everyone around an athlete is operating with the same information, at the same time, in the same place. It sounds simple. In practice, it is a radical idea for an industry that has long run on phone calls, PDFs, and hope.
The most visible believer in that idea is Ashton Jeanty, the Las Vegas Raiders running back who signed a four-year, $35.9 million rookie contract in 2025. Jeanty is not just a customer or a casual endorser. He has taken equity in Nukleus and signed on as the platform’s public face. The relationship did not come from a cold pitch or a celebrity endorsement deal. Rivas and Jeanty knew each other from Rivas’s years at Disruptive Sports, and Jeanty had been tracking what Rivas was building. When the time came to talk, Rivas flew to Las Vegas and walked Jeanty through the product, the team, and where the company was headed. Jeanty saw something that spoke directly to his own experience. “Coming into the NFL, you become a CEO, directing a team of agents, advisors, and marketers, whether you’re ready or not,” Jeanty said in a statement. “Nukleus is what finally gets them all on the same page, so I can actually run that team the way it should be run. That’s why I invested in it.” That quote captures the human reality behind the startup. A rookie entering the NFL does not just need to learn how to read a defense. They suddenly have a small business to manage—contracts to understand, appearances to schedule, investments to evaluate, taxes to file, brand deals to weigh. Most athletes are handed a team of professionals and told to trust them, without being given the tools to actually coordinate what those professionals are doing. Jeanty’s investment is a signal that the people living this experience recognize the problem. It is also a bet that Nukleus can solve it.
Behind the pitch is a team that has seen the sports business from multiple angles. Rivas’s own path is unusual: after ThriftBooks and EcoGoodz, he spent years inside Disruptive Sports, working the business side of the agency and watching the chaos firsthand. He left the agency earlier this year to build Nukleus full time. Around him, he has assembled a group of people who understand both technology and the high-stakes world of professional athletics. CTO Eric Ahlstrom previously worked at Microsoft, Unity, Oracle, and ESPN. Chief creative officer Ben Miller was a creative director at the University of Washington and CAA Sports. CFO Matt Porter worked with Rivas at ThriftBooks, EcoGoodz, and Disruptive. The company has a team of twelve based out of its Issaquah office, plus a supporting engineering team in India, and most of the team is engineering. Nukleus has also attracted a group of strategic investors with deep resumes: Mat McBride, Microsoft’s executive vice president and CFO for commercial products and infrastructure; Brent Beardall, president and CEO of WaFd Bank; investor Skyler Nelson, previously of Vulcan Capital and its successor firm Cercano; and Dr. Brett Kindle of the Andrews Institute in Gulf Breeze, Florida. The pre-seed round came from friends and family in 2025, and the company is raising again now, though Rivas declined to disclose the total amount raised. The mix of people—tech executives, bankers, investors, and a sports medicine doctor—suggests that Nukleus is aiming at something bigger than a niche tool for agents. It looks like a startup, but it feels like a reunion of people who have all seen how messy the business of sports can be, and who believe there is a better way.
Nukleus is entering a market where other companies have already staked claims. Agent Live 360 sells software built specifically for sports agents. Opendorse, which says it works with more than a thousand sports agents, offers tools to negotiate, approve, and track deals. But Rivas argues that Nukleus is different because it serves everyone in an athlete’s orbit, not just one slice of it. The distinction matters. A tool built for an agent might make the agent’s life easier, but it does not solve the underlying problem of disconnected professionals working from different versions of reality. A deal-tracking tool might help a marketing team, but it does not help the lawyer who needs to review the contract before the deal is signed. Nukleus wants to be the shared layer underneath all of those roles—the single source of truth that makes every other tool more useful. It is a bigger bet, and a harder one, because it requires different kinds of professionals to change how they work. But it also reflects the way the sports industry is evolving. Athletes are increasingly expected to be brands, investors, and business owners, not just performers. That means the number of professionals around them keeps growing, and the need for coordination keeps growing with it. The old model—everyone in their own silo, communicating through the athlete or the agent—is no longer sustainable. Nukleus is betting that the future belongs to platforms that can bring all those silos together. The early adoption by athletes, agents, lawyers, and marketing staff suggests that the pitch is resonating, at least with the people who feel the pain most directly. The pricing is modest enough to be accessible, but the ambition is not.
Rivas’s vision for Nukleus goes far beyond a useful app. “Long-term, I don’t see this as a tool athletes use, I see it as the infrastructure the entire business of sports runs on,” he says. “Every athlete becomes the center of their own connected team, and every professional working with them, across every sport, at every level, operates on one shared system instead of a hundred disconnected ones.” That is the kind of ambition that sounds grandiose until you remember where Rivas started. He built ThriftBooks from a storage unit into a national company by paying attention to the unglamorous details of logistics and operations. He spent years inside a sports agency watching talented people struggle because they did not have the right systems. Now he is applying those lessons to an industry that has long been more focused on the flash of game day than the quiet work of running a career. The story of Nukleus is, in many ways, a story about the invisible side of sports—the contracts, deadlines, tax filings, and negotiations that happen long before the cameras are on. It is about giving athletes the same kind of operational support that any successful CEO would expect. And it is about recognizing that the business of sports has outgrown the tools that were never built for it. With Jeanty as a partner and a team of people who have lived the problem, Nukleus is making a serious attempt to build the infrastructure that the industry has been missing. Whether it becomes the standard or not, it is already changing the conversation about what athletes need—not just to play, but to run their careers like the businesses they are.
