OpenAI has grown from a $1 billion valuation in 2019 to $852 billion in 2026. Anthropic went from $61.5 billion in March 2025 to $965 billion today, surpassing OpenAI to become the most valuable private AI company in history. SpaceX is pricing its IPO this week at $1.77 trillion. Together, three companies that barely existed in the public consciousness a decade ago now represent more combined value than the GDP of France.
Retail investors built these companies. They use ChatGPT, they fly on Starlink-connected flights, and they run businesses on Claude. And almost all of them have been locked out of investing in the company and the upside of the growth.
The IPO drought that locked the door
This is not a new problem. It is a structural one that has been compounding for a decade.
The number of publicly listed U.S. companies has roughly halved since 1996. The U.S. IPO market hit a low of just 90 deals in 2022, raising $8.6 billion, according to EY data, a collapse from the record $450 billion raised globally in 2021. Even as markets partially recovered to 216 U.S. deals and $47.4 billion in 2025, the companies generating the most value stayed private through all of it. They raised from sovereign wealth funds, institutional VCs, and hyperscalers. Retail watched from the outside.
The math on what that exclusion cost is staggering. Anthropic’s valuation increased roughly 15-fold in a single year. OpenAI went from $300 billion in early 2025 to $852 billion by March 2026. Investors who had access to private markets saw those gains. Investors who did not had no mechanism to participate.
The demand retail is creating
The desire for exposure has been impossible to ignore.
Closed-end funds holding stakes in private technology companies have become one of the few accessible on-ramps for retail investors, and the market has responded with extraordinary enthusiasm. Several vehicles trading on public exchanges have seen retail demand drive prices to 10 to 20 times the value of their underlying assets before sharp corrections followed. The pattern reveals something important: the hunger for pre-IPO exposure is real and growing, but the vehicle matters as much as the thesis. A fund trading at a 20x premium to its net asset value is not an investment in private technology companies. It is a bet on sentiment.
The question for investors is not whether to seek exposure to this asset class. It is whether the structure they are using was built for it.
How retail can participate and what to look for
The IPO wave arriving this year offers the most direct path retail investors have ever had to these companies. SpaceX is expected to list June 12, 2026. Anthropic and OpenAI are both targeting public debuts before year-end.
But IPO day is not the starting line for returns. For most retail buyers, it is closer to the finish line, after years of private compounding have already occurred. The structures that have emerged to address this vary widely in quality.
Closed-end funds regulated under the Investment Company Act of 1940 represent one of the more structurally sound options. They can hold private company stakes and trade on public exchanges with regulated disclosure requirements, daily NAV reporting, and no accreditation thresholds. Powerlaw Corp. (Nasdaq: PWRL), which completed a direct listing on Nasdaq in May 2026, was built by Akkadian Ventures, a secondary market investor with 16 years and more than 825 transactions in private technology companies. Its current portfolio includes SpaceX, OpenAI, Kalshi, Deel, Stripe, Kraken, Vast Data, Databricks, Tether, Colossal Biosciences, Mercor, Perplexity, Canva, Groq, Rippling, Saronic, Figma, and Waymo.
What separates a fund like this from a sentiment-driven vehicle is the experience and team behind the portfolio. Venture capitalists approach private markets differently than retail investors chasing headlines. The thesis is not about owning today’s most recognizable names. It is about identifying the companies that may become the next SpaceX or OpenAI, before the rest of the market knows their names. That requires deep sourcing, secondary market expertise, and the patience to hold through the years when a company is still private and compounding quietly. By the time a company is ringing a bell on an exchange, a VC has typically been in the position for years.
The critical distinction for any investor evaluating these vehicles is whether the fund is trading at a premium to NAV, whether the underlying holdings are independently valued, and whether the manager has a verifiable track record in private markets, not just a list of logos.
Private markets have built the most valuable companies in history. For once, retail does not have to watch it from the outside.
