A Startup Is Selling Fans Shares in Baseball Players' Future Pay. The Last Three Companies to Try Show What Breaks.

Agentiq, a start-up that launched in the week of 7 October 2026 with roughly $4 million in venture funding, pays professional baseball players cash now in exchange for a percentage of their future on-field earnings, then sells fractional interests in that income stream to fans through securities offerings. The model is not new. Front Office Sports, the trade publication that reported the launch and the source of everything we say about Agentiq, lists three earlier companies that tried versions of it. Each broke in a different place, and those three failures say more about the product than its launch does.

A sourcing note. Our account of Agentiq's product, fees and plans comes from that single Front Office Sports article, which relays the company's own description. We have not seen its offering documents. The Fernando Tatis Jr. dispute is also documented by Courthouse News, whose report we use for the contract and award figures.

The product in one paragraph

Agentiq's co-founders are Zach Kurtz and Reuben Abraham. It starts with baseball. Its current athletes, per Front Office Sports, are Diamondbacks reliever Justin Martinez, Pirates outfielder Esmerlyn Valdez and Cardinals starter Hunter Dobbins, along with two prospects. The athlete takes cash up front. In return, a share of what he later earns on the field is sold in slices to fans. The risks split cleanly: the athlete gives up some upside and gets certainty; the fan takes the uncertainty of a career, including injury, decline and the athlete's willingness to keep paying. Abraham described the aim as building a 'mini Robinhood', and said it is critical to get right because it is people's money. Kurtz said investing in humans carries inherent risks.

Three predecessors, three failures

Fantex: not enough trading

Fantex launched in 2012 with former NFL players Vernon Davis, Alshon Jeffery and Mohamed Sanu, and had folded by 2016, partly because trading volumes were low, according to Front Office Sports. That is a liquidity failure: an interest in one athlete's income has few natural buyers, so a holder who wants out may find no price. Sanu's case also shows the other side of the contract. Fantex paid him $1.56 million, at age 24, for 10 percent of his future football earnings, and in 2021 an arbitrator ruled that Fantex owed him just under $1.15 million. Kurtz argues that if Fantex had done in 2012 what Agentiq is doing now, it would have worked well. That is a hypothesis, not evidence.

Finlete: one athlete carried the company

Finlete, founded in 2021, was built around Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase, a three-time All-Star who signed a five-year, $20 million contract with Cleveland in 2022. Clase was indicted over an alleged illegal pitch-rigging scheme, which is an allegation, not a finding. Finlete's CEO, Rob Connolly, had said investor dividends would continue as long as Clase was paid at the Major League level. In March, Clase's paid leave became unpaid leave. Finlete did not respond to Front Office Sports about the effect on investors, so we do not know whether payments have stopped. The structural point does not depend on the answer: when most of a product's value sits in one person, that person's legal or injury problem is the product's problem.

Big League Advance: the athlete stopped paying

Big League Advance (BLA), which is institutional-focused rather than retail, signed then-18-year-old Fernando Tatis Jr. in 2017. According to Courthouse News, it paid him $2 million up front for 10 percent of his annual professional baseball earnings for 25 years if he reached the majors. In 2021 the Padres signed him to a 14-year, $340 million contract; the same report says that left him owing $34 million to BLA's fund. He stopped paying in 2024.

An arbitrator then ordered him to pay $3,230,837 in principal, $240,515 in interest, $250,000 in attorney fees and $14,349 in costs: about $3.74 million in total. In May 2026 Judge Judy Bae of San Diego Superior Court denied his bid to vacate the award, reasoning that a challenge to the legality of the entire contract must be raised before arbitration begins. Tatis argues the contract is void under the California Financing Law; BLA says it is an investment, not a loan. His lawyer said an appeal is likely.

Where the return goes

The Tatis numbers put a scale on what these contracts can pay. The $2 million advance against a $34 million obligation is 17 times the original cash; the $3.74 million award is 1.9 times the advance, and about 11 percent of the $34 million. The gap between those figures is the reason enforcement matters: the investor's return is not the headline percentage but whatever the athlete actually pays.

Then there is the fee stack. Front Office Sports reports three layers: a 1 percent broker fee paid to broker-dealer Andes Capital, a one-time negotiation fee of roughly 4 percent of gross proceeds for current athletes (per an SEC filing the article cites), and a 2.5 percent maintenance fee on distributions to investors, which is $2.50 per $100 paid out. The article does not say what base the first two apply to. On the simplest reading, both come off the money raised, so about $95 of every $100 invested would reach the athlete or the pool, and the maintenance fee would then take $2.50 from each $100 distributed, so an investor would receive $97.50. The company says it aims to lower fees as it scales. That is the company's statement, not a commitment we can check.

What Agentiq says it will fix

Agentiq's planned features are insurance, the ability for investors to sell their interests to other investors, and 'baskets' of multiple players so fans can diversify. Mapping them against the three failures: a secondary market addresses Fantex's liquidity problem, but only if buyers show up, and the Fantex lesson is that they did not. Baskets address Finlete's key-person problem by spreading a fan's money across several players, though diversification does not help if the flow of money from all of them is thin. Insurance might help if an athlete is hurt, but the article gives no detail on what it would cover, and we cannot say whether it would respond to a case like Clase's.

None of the three reaches the BLA problem. If an athlete stops paying, a secondary market, a basket and an injury policy all leave the investor depending on a contract that may be challenged as an unlicensed loan. Agentiq distributes through securities offerings, and Front Office Sports describes it as regulated by the SEC. But the coverage does not say how the underlying athlete agreements differ from the one Tatis is contesting, and the athlete's obligation is the part a fan investor cannot diversify away.

The reasonable case for the product is that earlier attempts failed through execution and timing, not because the idea is unsound: Fantex ran in a thin retail market, and BLA's dispute concerns one athlete who became very wealthy and wanted out. The case against is that all three failure modes are structural. They come with the asset, which is a human being's future income, and a better app does not change that.

What we can't tell yet

• All facts about Agentiq's terms come from one trade-press article relaying the company; its offering documents are not independently documented here.
• The percentages Agentiq takes from athletes, and the base for its broker and negotiation fees, are not stated.
• Insurance coverage details are not given, and neither is the planned secondary-market design.
• The Tatis case may be appealed, and the California Financing Law question has not been decided on its merits.
• Finlete has not said how Clase's unpaid leave affects investors.