Alex Cooper’s Unwell Takes Its First Outside Money, and the Number Attached is Glam Quant

Patrick Whitesell’s WTSL becomes Unwell’s first outside investor, arriving months after a bruising workplace exposé tested the brand Cooper built.

Unwell has taken its first check from an outsider, and the number that came with it is $500 million. WTSL, the media, entertainment, and sports investment firm led by former Endeavor executive chairman Patrick Whitesell and Jason Lublin, has made a strategic investment in the company behind Call Her Daddy, value the business at half a billion dollars. The size of the check itself was not disclosed, but multiple outlets report on the deal, including Bloomberg, Axios, and Variety, confirm the value figure indie. It is the first time Cooper and her husband, Matt Kaplan, have let anyone else onto the cap table since found the company in 2023.

That alone would be a notable milestone for a media business built almost entirely out of one podcast’s audience. But the timing gives the deal a second layer. It lands roughly two months after a lengthy Vanity Fair investigation into Unwell’s internal culture, one that put Kaplan’s management style, and by extension the brand’s carefully built image, under public scrutiny. WTSL’s arrival does not erase that backdrop. It sits right next to it.

Podcast Interview Inside The Call Her Daddy Studio With Two Guests Seated Across From Each Other In Pink Armchairs Beside A Marble Fireplace

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According to the report WTSL is making a strategic investment in Unwell that values the company at $500 million on a pre-money basis, a figure Unwell itself confirmed to Axios. Cooper and Kaplan, who self-fund the business from its 2023 launch, retain a majority ownership stake, and Unwell has said it has been profitable since day one. The capital is being positioned as growth funding rather than a rescue package: money to expand the company’s video operation, its consumer products line, and, notably, to pursue acquisitions.

WTSL’s involvement is not limited to a check. The firm has said it will also lend “deep strategic expertise, industry relationships and a proven track record of supporting some of the most innovative companies and storytellers in media,” lang that points toward its existing portfolio, which includes Peyton Manning‘s Omaha Productions. For a company that has grown almost entirely on the strength of Cooper’s own reach, that kind of institutional connective tissue is arguably as valuable as the capital itself.

Unwell has described its audience as 89 percent female, with 72 percent of that group between 18 and 35, and says it now reaches nearly 100 million followers across platforms. The company’s podcast network runs more than a dozen shows on top of Call Her Daddy, including Alix Earle‘s Hot Mess and Madeline Argy‘s Pretty Lonesome, and it has pushed further into film and television, live events, and branded consumer products, including a hydration and energy drink line.

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Whitesell is not a newcomer to the entertainment finance world. He co-founded WME and spent more than a decade as a top executive at Endeavor, working alongside Ari Emanuel before the two eventually parted ways, and he later served as executive chairman of TKO, the combined WWE and UFC parent company. His client list over the years has included movie stars such as Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. He launched WTSL after exiting Endeavor and WME, backed by the private equity firm Silver Lake, with a stated focus on media, entertainment, and sports.

Jason Lublin, WTSL’s co-lead, rounds out the firm’s leadership. Together the pair have built a portfolio that leans toward founder-led media brands with built-in audiences, of which Omaha Productions, Manning’s company, is the clearest existing example. Unwell fits a similar profile: a business with a singular, recognizable face at the center of it, an engaged fan base, and ambitions that extend well past its original format.

For Whitesell personally, the Unwell investment is also a bet that a podcast-first company can be built into something considerably larger. “Alex, Matt and the team have demonstrated an exceptional ability to anticipate where audiences are headed and create entertainment experiences that resonate deeply,” he said in a statement announcing the deal. “The company’s growth, audience connection and cultural relevance set it apart, and we believe Unwell is uniquely positioned to help define the present and future of media.”

Silver Lake’s presence in the background is also worth note. The private equity firm has spent the past several years moving deeper into sports, media, and entertainment hold well beyond its tradition technology invest root, and backing Whitesell’s post-Endeavor venture fits that broader pattern. It places Unwell in the same gen orbit as other creator and talent-driven businesses that have recently drawn institutional capital, part of a wider shift among investors toward media companies build around a single, highly engage personal rather than a tradition studio or network structure.

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Cooper’s path to a $500 million value started considerable smaller. Call Her Daddy launched in 2018 as a candid, unfiltered sex and relationships show, co-hosted at the time with Sofia Franklyn and distributed through Barstool Sports. A contract dispute with Barstool president Dave Portnoy led to Cooper and Franklyn parting ways in 2020, and Cooper took the show to Spotify the following year on a three year deal reported to be worth roughly $60 million.

By 2023, Call Her Daddy had grown into Spotify’s second most listened to podcast, trailing only The Joe Rogan Experience, and Cooper used that leverage to launch the Unwell Network alongside Kaplan, expanding beyond her own show into a small stable of talent including Earle, Argy, Harry Jowsey, and Owen Thiele. In August 2024, Cooper moved her distribution and advertising business from Spotify to SiriusXM, in a multi year deal reported at up to $125 million, more than double her prior Spotify agreement, while keeping Call Her Daddy available across other platforms rather than making it fully exclusive.

That deal also folded in the rest of the Unwell audio slate, giving SiriusXM exclusive global ad sales rights across the network. TIME has called Cooper “arguably the most successful woman in podcasting,” and her interview list backs up the description, with guests ranging from Kamala Harris and Gwyneth Paltrow to Post Malone and Miley Cyrus. Unwell itself has since branched into a documentary, Call Her Alex, dating format Love Overboard, another dating series called Let’s Marry Harry, and a creative agency arm, alongside the consumer products and live events business.

Unwell co-CEO Alex Cooper and WTSL CEO Patrick Whitesell

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In her own statement on the investment, Cooper frame the deal as fuel for a company that already sees itself as an authority-driven media brand rather than a single show. “Trust has become the ultimate distribution channel and seventy million women a month tune into Unwell,” she said. “We’re scaling on all fronts, combining nimbleness, social-first premium content, and our understanding of culture to serve this highly influential audience. With WTSL’s backing, the company is now also poised to accelerate our media platform’s growth through acquisitions and investments.”

That acquisition lang was not incidental. Speaking to CNBC around the announcement, Cooper indicated the company is actively looking at creative agencies it could bring in house, frame the strategy as additive to what Unwell has already built around its core demographic. “All of the acquisitions that we’re looking to get into business with, it would have to make sense for Unwell as a whole of what we’ve built, which is primarily focusing on women as a demographic,” she said, adding that the company is eyeing “some creative agencies that maybe we could acquire that already has the infrastructure, more non-traditional.”

Whitesell, for his part, cast the investment as a bet on Cooper and Kaplan’s instincts for where audiences are moving next, rather than simply a bet on Call Her Daddy’s existing scale. Bloomberg’s reporting on the deal characterized it in similarly ambitious terms, describe Whitesell as betting that Cooper and Kaplan can build Unwell into a billion dollar media business, roughly double where the WTSL investment currently places it.

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None of this is happening in a vacuum. In June, Vanity Fair published a lengthy investigation into Unwell’s internal culture, drawing on interviews with more than 40 sources, at least 30 of them current or former employees, the bulk of them women in their early 20s for whom the job was among their first out of school. The piece described a workplace some former staffers characterized as marked by fear and volatility, with several current and former employees attributing the tension specifically to Kaplan, Unwell’s co-founder and co-CEO, alleging he berated staff and made demeaning comments about their appearance. Unwell did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment ahead of publication.

Cooper has since pushed back on the characterization directly. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal around the time of the funding announcement, she addressed the scrutiny without conceding its substance. “I think that we have done a really incredible job at Unwell, and I think if you walk the halls, there are so many people that are so happy to work at this company,” she said. “I think, unfortunately, being a woman in this industry is extremely difficult because you’re held to a complete different standard. Whether it’s a smear campaign being created for someone’s narrative, whatever it be.” She added, when pressed further by the outlet, that reading unfounded claims meant to serve someone else’s agenda was its own kind of obvious situation.

Axios, in its own reporting on the WTSL deal, was direct about the juxtaposition, noting that the capital arrives to support Unwell’s expansion ambitions “even amid scrutiny of its leadership.” Whether the investment changes the conversation around the company’s internal culture or simply runs alongside it is not something WTSL’s money resolves on its own. What it does confirm is that, at least among the institutional investors circling founder led media brands, the Vanity Fair story was not disqualifying.

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For now, the immediate plan is expansion rather than restructure. WTSL’s capital is earmarked for growing Unwell’s video business, which has increasingly become podcasting’s dominant format as platforms from YouTube to Netflix, Disney+, and Peacock compete for the same viewers, alongside its consumer products arm and a stated appetite for acquisitions that fit the company’s existing focus on young female audiences. Cooper and Kaplan retain majority control, meaning WTSL’s role is closer to a strategic growth partner than a change in who runs the company day to day.

There is also the question of format. Podcasting’s center of gravity has been shifting from audio toward video for several years now, with YouTube emerging as a primary discovery engine for shows that once lived almost entirely on audio feeds, and Unwell’s leadership has signaled that video is one of the specific areas WTSL’s capital is meant to accelerate. A stronger video operation would also make Unwell’s existing SiriusXM and consumer products relationships more valuable, giving advertisers and partners more surface area across formats rather than a single audio feed.

So either Unwell’s potential reach of the billion dollar outcome Whitesell is reportedly bet on will depend on execution that extends well beyond Call Her Daddy’s existing audience, into whatever acquisitions and formats the company chooses next. It will also depend, at least in the court of public opinion, on how the company answers the questions the Vanity Fair story raised. For a business built on the idea that trust is a distribution channel, that answer may end up mattering as much as the $500 million figure itself.