Same Bet, Different Structure
"Fortunes require leverage. Capital and labor are the old leverage. Code and media are the new leverage."
Naval Ravikant said that in 2018. He had already been proving it for eight years. AngelList is the code he built.
In 2010, Naval looked at venture capital and saw what everyone else saw: a closed system where access was the product. His answer was to build infrastructure. Syndicate tools, rolling funds, SPV administration. That infrastructure democratized access by changing how the asset class was organized and distributed. Deals got shared. Networks opened up. A new generation of managers got the tools to start.
USVC is the next iteration of that thesis. A registered closed-end fund managed by AngelList Asset Management, with Naval chairing the Investment Committee and Ankur Nagpal running the portfolio. It holds positions in Anthropic, xAI, Vercel, Sierra, and Mercury, among others. Now he is leveraging both. AngelList is the code. His ideas, his reputation, his fifteen years of being right, that is the media. USVC is what happens when you combine them.
After seeing him launch USVC in April, UpRound subscribed in May. The decision changed how we think about portfolio construction. Direct deals will always be the core of what we do. But our members deserve more than a collection of concentrated bets. They deserve Naval's network, access to deal flow signals they could not generate on their own, and a realistic path to liquidity that does not depend entirely on an IPO cycle.
That is why UpRound invested in USVC.
USVC was the first position that crystallized the logic. A single allocation gives our members indirect exposure to some of the most important private companies being built right now. It plugs us into AngelList's platform data: years of syndicate flow, founder behavior, round velocity, co-investor patterns across thousands of deals. That data is the leverage USVC has and makes us better at our direct investments. It tells us where the early conviction is forming before it shows up in a term sheet.
The connection to AngelList runs deeper than a fund position. Brinc also runs a syndicate on AngelList. We have syndicated two deals through it from Brinc's portfolio. That is not a coincidence. It is the same infrastructure, doing what it was always meant to do. Give people with real deal flow a way to invest together.
When we invested in USVC, we were not buying exposure to a fund we found interesting. We were doubling down on a platform we already use.
UpRound and USVC run a barbell. On one end: late-stage compounders, companies that have already proven the model and are still private, where the remaining upside is real but the risk of zero is lower. On the other: early-stage asymmetric positions, the kind where the outcome is binary and the multiple, if it hits, is the one that defines the portfolio. USVC sources the early end of that barbell through AngelList's platform data. UpRound sources from Brinc's network. The intelligence is different. The barbell logic is the same.
There is one more thing worth saying about why this position makes sense for UpRound members specifically. USVC is a registered fund with daily Net Asset Value (NAV) calculation. In five years, when the portfolio has compounded, we can exit at NAV. That is not how most venture positions work. Most require you to wait for a liquidity event you do not control. This one gives us optionality. That matters when you are managing a club portfolio across multiple time horizons.
Venture capital is being reimagined again from the inside. Naval spent fifteen years building AngelList and now USVC to broaden access to venture capital. Sometimes the best investment thesis is the simplest one: bet on the person who has been right about this longer than most.
Bashar Aboudaoud
Managing Member, UpRound
