When Amazon went public in 1997, it was about three years old and valued at over $400 million. Investors who bought those shares and held them captured decades of growth. SpaceX took a very different path. It went public this year after more than two decades as a private company, at a valuation approaching $2 trillion. The big difference? Average investors have been able to participate in Amazon’s public stock growth, while private investors have reaped benefits from SpaceX’s growth as a private company.

The shift is simple: much of the value creation now happens in private markets. Investors who stay only in public stocks may arrive after much of the growth has already happened. Alumni Ventures (AV) was built to close that gap, giving individual accredited investors access to venture-backed companies at the earliest stages, when valuations are lower.

Companies Are Staying Private Much Longer

The numbers behind this shift are striking. There are about half as many U.S. public companies today as there were two decades ago. Meanwhile, there are roughly five times as many private companies of a similar size with 500 or more employees.(1)

The road to an IPO has also gotten longer. In 2000, a venture-backed company typically took five to eight years to go public. Today, it takes closer to 12 to 14 years.(2)

That has created a significant backlog in the number of “unicorns,” currently around 1,300, being private companies valued at $1 billion or more. Together they’re worth $7.3 trillion, and almost half of them have been around for nine years or longer.(3)

“Those are companies that are ripe to go public,” says Laura Rippy, Managing Partner at AV. Until they do, “the people who are investing on the private side are making all the money.”

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Entry Price Matters More Than Anything

The case for private markets comes down to when you get in and what you pay.

Take Oura, the smart ring company, as an example from the Alumni Ventures portfolio. AV invested in their Series B round back in 2019 at a valuation of around $100M. Last year, Oura raised capital at an $11 billion valuation, and all of that growth happened while the company is still private. If you were an AV Oura investor in 2019, then you would have captured the proliferation to an $11 billion valuation – that is not accessible to investors entering now.(4)

Groq, the AI chip company, tells a similar story. AV invested in its Series C at a $1 billion valuation. About four years later, Groq’s deal with Nvidia valued the company at roughly $20 billion. Around 2,000 individual investors held allocation in Groq through AV.(5)

Outcomes like these take patience and diversification. Not every startup succeeds, so AV offers diversified funds across a broad portfolio of companies rather than betting on a handful of names. The parallel here is to mutual funds. Most individual investors have diversified mutual funds in their portfolio. At AV our diversified funds like Foundation Fund fit that bill for venture.

Looking Around the Corner

Venture investors don’t just buy earlier. They also buy into trends before those trends show up in public market indexes.

Here are trends that Alumni Ventures has been watching closely:

Defense innovation. Apart from Palantir, defense exposure in public markets is mostly the large prime contractors. Much of the new work in drones, autonomy, and advanced manufacturing is happening at early-stage startups. PitchBook ranks AV as the most active investor in defense in 2025.

The space economy. Space is a market worth $625 billion today, larger than the airline industry. McKinsey projects it could reach $1.8 trillion by 2035. SpaceX’s reduction in launch costs are comparable to what AWS did for reducing the cost of cloud hosting, which opened the door to a whole generation of new companies.(6)

Nuclear energy. AI data centers need enormous amounts of power, and AV holds 12 nuclear investments. Three of the four Nuclear companies that made it through the Trump Administration’s Race to Criticality are AV companies: Aalo Atomics, Valar Atomics, and Radiant Energy.(7)

AI across the stack. Around 55% of U.S. consumers now start product research with an AI tool instead of a search engine, per Nielsen. That shift is changing which companies get discovered and chosen. AI is also reaching industries like manufacturing, where companies are bringing production back to the U.S. while a large share of the workforce nears retirement.(8)

The IPO Window Is Reopening

After several slow years, the IPO market is coming back to life. This is good news for venture investors in two ways.

First, it creates exits for companies that have been private for years. Previous Alumni Ventures portfolio company, X-Energy, builds small modular nuclear reactors, and went public earlier this year, raising $1.02 billion in the largest nuclear sector IPO.(9) Three other AV portfolio companies went public in 2026: Xanadu, HawkEye 360, and Generate Biomedicines.

Second, big IPOs tend to spark new startups. Early employees leave with capital and experience and go on to build their own companies. Impulse Space, an AV portfolio company, is an example. Its founder, Tom Mueller, was SpaceX’s first employee, and AV has backed the company since its Series A. Managing Partner Laura Rippy calls it “probably the next SpaceX.”

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Traditional Investing Advice Agrees

The private markets view matches a broader shift among traditional asset managers. In a recent piece, Vanguard noted that private funds run by top-tier teams at a reasonable cost “can enhance investor outcomes.” The framework suggests putting 0% to 40% of an investor’s total equity allocation in private markets.(10)

Vanguard notes that because there’s no index fund for private companies, consistent access to top managers is essential. For most individual investors, that access was previously the missing piece.

Venture has also historically had a low correlation with public markets, which can make it a useful complement to a portfolio heavy in stocks.(11)

How Individual Investors Can Get Access

Access has long been the biggest barrier. Most top venture funds have been open only to institutions and the ultra-wealthy.

Alumni Ventures was built to change that. Founded about a dozen years ago, the firm has raised roughly $1.8 billion from individual accredited investors and ranks as the third most active venture investor in the world. About two-thirds of its investments are at the seed and Series A stages. It typically invests alongside established venture firms that lead each round.

Private market investing comes down to three things: get in early, diversify, and be patient. For investors who want to take part in the next wave of innovation before it reaches public markets, that may be the most important timeline to understand.

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Sponsored content. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Venture capital investments are speculative and illiquid and involve a high degree of risk, including the possible loss of the entire investment. Past performance of any portfolio company does not indicate future results. Investments are available only to accredited investors.