Sunjay Guleria and his team had an idea for a co-branded bottle, and there wasn’t much more to it than that. So perhaps they got lucky. Or maybe, as Guleria described it, it was “magic.”
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Some of the investors in his company, Roam Technologies, were North Carolina alums. The bottle they envisioned could be wrapped in any form or shape or color, Guleria said. So the connections alone made UNC a natural first partner. The conversations started innocently, Guleria said, and not too long ago.
“Three months ago,” Guleria said, “we didn’t even have a bottle.”
Yet on Sept. 30, the North Carolina athletic department announced in a release that Carolina Athletics and Roam Technologies are launching a new line of officially licensed Carolina drinkware, a bottle designed by Roam Technologies featuring the UNC logo. The release said that the marketing for the bottle would be a campaign led by athletes, who will “share the bottles with their audiences and help build the brand through original content.”
Though it was Guleria’s first foray into this world, deals like this are part of a larger strategy for UNC. And by design, it moved quickly. North Carolina has undergone some restructuring to increase their capacity for and streamline processes such as this as a way of generating new revenue streams, ones that fill multiple buckets: a singular product launch that pays the university through a licensing deal, sponsorship deal and provides NIL opportunities, too.
The NIL component, though, is the biggest variable in UNC and Roam Technologies’ deal. This is the first product launch for Guleria’s startup. But the symbiotic approach is attempting to “prove a model,” Guleria said — that athletes can help build Roam Technologies’ brand and, as the brand grows, that benefits athletes from an NIL perspective.
That’s what makes the athlete partnership part of the deal distinct, but it’s also just another example of the ways in which North Carolina is seeking partnerships with brands. Even if that means that it’s joining in very near the ground floor of a startup’s journey.
“That’s what makes this one unique,” UNC deputy athletics director and chief revenue officer Rick Barakat said. “Hopefully, it becomes a very successful case study for us that we can package up and we can take to other brands.”
Barakat doesn’t expect UNC will join all deals like this in the launch phase, and that’s more a product of the relationships it had with the founders of Roam Technologies to co-concept the bottle together.
Prior to the Roam Technologies co-branded bottle launch, UNC Athletics and Cape Fear Distillery previously rolled out a Tar Heel-Branded line of spirits, which creates additional revenue streams to UNC through licensing and sponsorship deals — just without the NIL component.
UNC has moved around some offices to make processes like these more seamless. When Barakat joined his alma mater in 2025, he arrived with a background in marketing and licensing. Barakat said that, historically, brand engagement with colleges has been “choppy and fragmented.”
Barakat explained, in the old model, a brand would make a marketing deal with Tar Heel Sports Properties to do sponsorship, but then it would have to seek out the collegiate licensing company on campus for the licensing deal, gaining approvals from a different group of decision makers.
“We’re trying to knock those walls down,” Barakat said. “Make it a little easier.”
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Barakat now oversees UNC’s Trademarks and Licensing office, which is a part of athletics. Athletics is more expensive than it’s ever been.
The UNC System’s Board of Governors’ budget committee presented at a September meeting that, from fiscal year 2023 to fiscal year 2024, UNC-Chapel Hill’s athletics spending increased by $49 million (or 35%). That doesn’t even include revenue-sharing, with the $20.5 million each school will share with its athletes to show up in FY26.
Athletics is spending a lot, so UNC’s new structure puts athletics at the center of revenue generation efforts, too.
Barakat said UNC has done “probably a half a dozen deals” in the past year that incorporate both sponsorships and licensing. Having them each under the same roof is also a signal to brands, Barakat said.
“That’s something that we can kind of flaunt in the market,” Barakat said. “‘Hey, we’ve got this figured out, we’re ready to go.’ … We want to be one of your guinea pigs or pilot schools.”
Roam Technologies is launching its brand through its UNC athletics partnership. Guleria isn’t as privy to some of the ways UNC has changed. As an entrepreneur, he said he’s working on “some pretty cool technology.”
“So that takes a long, long, long time,” Guleria said.
This time, though, they were flexible. And things moved fast.
Since this launch would feature an NIL component where athletes would use their own brands to contribute to the marketing, there was interest in holding an event where interested athletes could attend and learn about TikTok Shop and content creation. Guleria invited content creators and TikTok Shop. He didn’t really know what he was picturing when the event was pitched.
“As an entrepreneur, I kind of have like this vision in my head, but it’s like a 1970s TV,” Guleria said. “It takes other people to bang on the side of it and mess with the bunny ears, and the picture gets sharper and sharper.”
But what he walked into was still beyond anything he ever imagined. The event was held at Kenan Memorial Stadium and was attended by what Guleria estimated to be around 90 athletes. They learned about TikTok shop, Instagram, how to post and monetize content. The workshop helps with athletes’ trajectory, Guleria said, and helps them build their own brand.
But the brand that served as their introduction to this was his.
“For us,” Guleria said, “it just felt like a strong win-win.”
This story was originally published October 23, 2026 at 5:25 AM with the headline “How UNC athletics is helping to launch a tech company — and an NIL opportunity.”
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