Sponsored

Any cape that's  takes funds and resources from outside organizations, a suzerain existence.

Modus operandi
Any sponsored team needs outside benefactors willing to donate resources to meet operating costs. Operating costs include upkeep for headquarters pay and benefits for the support crew, legal consultants and more.

While there is overlap with Corporate Teams, Sponsored Teams are not employees and can seek outside donors or resources independently; Corporate Teams are wholly owned by their single company and can not break away without, supposedly, forfeiting their cape identity.

The visibility of the team and attendance at their contributors events, promotion of certain brands, licensing of the teams individual or collective image interviews and more.

While the term is largely used in the context of Heroes it also applies to Villains and mercenaries. Consider for example the Deep web Ranking sites, which pay for many of the same things. It is unknown how common it is to have autonomous, yet long-term hirelings among villains. The Undersiders were this under another organization.

PRT position
The PRT may well be a Sponsored teams supporters, if they are a hero team. Arguably, a sponsored team could just be a more legal and socially acceptable version of mercenaries and would be treated as such, or a parahuman equivalent of a private security firm.

Warden position
Warden-affiliated hero teams seems to dip into this type of relationships, being more autonomous, including financial aspect, but still accepting fund from the Wardens and general public.

Notable Examples

 * Dryad Project 3“I haven’t fought alongside them. That’s part of it.  The other part is that  Recycler and Retouch are from Dryad Project 3. [...] sponsored, not corporate, so they had someone paying the bills and all they had to do was hero.  And they were pretty good at that.  The sponsors?   They started it off on the entire wrong foot.  Way too much promotion and way too much money pushed into a team with self-imposed mission of saving the planet.”  “Not a bad mission, considering how we ended up.”  “That’s the issue.  It wasn’t saving the planet from Endbringers or other threats.  It was saving us from ourselves.  Pollution, deforestation, ecology all things that have their validity… on Earth Aleph.  People didn’t buy it.  And if people aren’t buying, how do the sponsors get the money they invested back? [...] Hired a bunch of bright, genuinely cool heroes, diverse, all good, but few of those heroes cared about the mission before they joined the team, some didn’t care after, and the ones who were really gung-ho got sidelined-” [...] “The lack of care from sponsors and the hired-on heroes seemed pretty obvious to most.  Then the team got on the wrong side of the Youth Guard, broke or toed the line of just about every damn rule in the book when it came to costumes, school, friendships, throwing kids into violent situations… Two pairs of parents were saying they hadn’t seen their kid in weeks.”  “That was the part I heard about.”  I smiled.  “Yeah.  And the shitty thing is they had some good heroes.  Recycler and Retouch weren’t hip in a way that worked for Dryad Project Three, but they’re strong, they’re pretty capable with potential to place themselves in the public eye, and they’re earnest, which is really important.” [...] “What happened in the end?  Gold Morning?”  I shook my head.  “Two members of the other serious or semi-serious members joined a villain eco-terrorist group.  The team was barely staying afloat with money from sponsors, after a hundred fines from Youth Guard, court cases, more promotion and marketing, and then a reporter dropped an expose.  The sponsor wasn’t a saint in the eco thing, with cover-ups.  The heroes were a distraction.”  “Everything that could go wrong went wrong,” Anelace said. - Excerpt from Polarize 10.12
 * New Wave (mainly self-funded)
 * Haven
 * Goldenrod
 * Potential spin-off headed up by Unicorn IV (cancelled)
 * The Irregulars (arguably)
 * The Suits
 * The King's Men
 * Ossuary, being direct action activists, are likely to be outside sponsored.
 * The Undersiders
 * Bambina - Ranking site