Private vs. Public Markets

Private Market Compounding: Why Investors Can’t Afford to Sit Out

For decades, the public markets were the best game in town. You could build serious wealth by holding a basket of high-growth tech stocks, letting time and compound interest do the work. IPOs were inflection points, not exit ramps.
But that model is evolving. Today’s breakout companies are staying private longer, raising more capital from private investors, and generating most of their returns before they ever trade on a public exchange.

The shift is clear. Tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Netflix went public within six to eight years of being founded. The public markets captured nearly the entire growth curve. Amazon gained over 5,400X in value post-IPO. Microsoft and Netflix returned over 1700X. Google grew more than 90X. Investors could still get in late and win big.

That’s no longer the case. Today’s most valuable private companies including Stripe, ByteDance, OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic have raised billions while staying private. Many are already valued above any U.S. tech company at IPO. OpenAI is raising at $500 billion, SpaceX at $400 billion, and Anthropic at $170 billion. These companies have no urgent need to go public.

This shift is structural. The median IPO age has risen from under seven years in 2014 to over ten in 2024. Private equity assets under management now exceed $10.8 trillion, with forecasts pointing to $20 trillion by 2030. Secondary markets have matured into a $120+ billion industry. In many years, private secondaries now rival IPO capital raised. Founders and early investors no longer need to list to access liquidity.

Public markets still matter. They offer transparency, price discovery, and long-term access to retail investors. But if you are only investing at the IPO stage or later, you are arriving after much of the value has been captured. Waiting is no longer a strategy.

We are entering an era where compounding happens earlier and faster, behind closed doors. Investors without access to private market growth are likely to miss out on the returns that once defined public market success. This is not about chasing hype. It is about following where value is now being built, priced, and captured, and that journey starts long before the IPO bell rings.

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UpRounds are companies in our portfolio that are raising new funding rounds at higher valuations. Our goal is to simply connect interested parties to these great companies. Simple as that.

Mycorium
Vertical: Climate Tech
Description: Mycorium is a biotechnology startup that has developed technology to convert waste into sustainable and eco-friendly materials for the fashion industry. Mycorium are raising a $1.1M seed round to move to pilot scale production and obtain $100K in off-take agreements.
Pitch Deck Link 

Scenium
Vertical: Web3
Description: Scenium is a digital asset marketplace offering tokenized stocks, private funds, and cryptocurrencies, providing 24/7 trading, instant settlement, and access to exclusive investments for global investors. Scenium is raising a $1M seed round to reach 200,000 users and $20M in revenue by 2027.
Pitch Deck Link

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Portfolio Spotlight

Buk Protocol: The Home of Travel AI Agents

The $1.4 trillion travel industry has long relied on human agents, clunky booking sites, and endless hours scrolling blogs and social media. Buk Protocol says that era is over.

Their vision is an AI-first travel experience where agents handle everything: personalization, curation, and booking. Travelers stop planning and just show up. Buk’s agents learn your preferences over time, whether that’s budget, hotel style, or family needs, and automatically apply them to every future trip. Hotels, flights, experiences, even airport taxis are tailored without you lifting a finger.

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Instead of piecing together itineraries from TikTok clips and travel blogs, Buk trains influencer agents on the voices of 240,000 creators and hundreds of publishers. That knowledge gets packaged into AI agents you can query directly, turning scattered inspiration into real travel plans. On the supply side, influencers, hotels, tour operators, and airlines can create their own agents that work as 24/7 virtual reps. With a single click, they can claim content, monetize expertise, and interact directly with travelers. Buk is targeting 10,000 agents by year-end, converting static travel content into live, bookable conversations.

Buk’s flagship agent, KAI, is already in testing. KAI is a computer-use agent that works across booking platforms like Expedia, Agoda, and Booking. It reads screens, navigates sites, and acts on your behalf: booking flights, reserving hotels, even negotiating upgrades. Integrated with email and voice, KAI is the first step toward a world where travel planning runs quietly in the background.

Buk Protocol is not just reimagining how trips are booked, it is redefining who does the planning. In a future where AI agents are the interface for services, travel is the industry most ready for disruption.

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