Miguel Afonso Caetano#AI #GenerativeAI #VCs #CashingOut #AIHype #SPVs: "VCs are clamoring to invest in hot AI companies, willing to pay exorbitant share prices for coveted spots on their cap tables. Even so, most aren’t able to get into such deals at all. Yet, small, unknown investors, including family offices and high-net-worth individuals, have found their own way to get shares of the hottest private startups like Anthropic, Groq, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Elon Musk’s X.ai (the makers of Grok).
They are using special purpose vehicles, or SPVs, where multiple parties pool their money to share an allocation of a single company. SPVs are generally formed by investors who have direct access to the shares of these startups and then turn around and sell a part of their allocation to external backers, often charging significant fees while retaining some profit share (known as carry).
While SPVs aren’t new – smaller investors have relied on them for years – there’s a growing trend of SPVs successfully getting shares from the biggest names in AI.
These investors are finding that the most popular AI companies, except OpenAI, are not all that hard for them to buy at their smaller levels of investing."
