The $3 Trillion Moment: Why the Real Value Is Created Before the Bell
A recap of our recent webinar with Mike Collins, Founder & CEO of Alumni Ventures, and Gray Chynoweth, Co-Founder and CEO of PrePublic Equity Partners.
This year, the bell finally rang for SpaceX. Its listing became one of the largest public debuts on record, and Anthropic and OpenAI are now taking their own steps toward the public markets. Taken together, these companies could introduce more than $3 trillion of new market value to public investors in a matter of months, representing a concentration of value entering the public markets in a single window that has few precedents.
It's indeed a remarkable headline. But at PrePublic Equity Partners, we think the headline quietly misses the more important story for investors considering their own portfolio construction strategy. By the time these companies ring the bell, incredible amounts of value have already been built privately, largely out of reach of the individual investor. What does that mean as you look at your “equity” bucket within a broader allocation strategy, and how staying-private-longer has impacted traditional portfolio construction considerations. That was a crucial throughline of our recent conversation between our CEO, Gray Chynoweth, and our co-host Mike Collins of Alumni Ventures: a practitioners' view of where the private-market opportunity is actually forming.
The value is created before the bell
Start with a single statistic. In 1999, the median company going public was about five years old. By 2024 it had climbed to fourteen. Companies now routinely scale and compound for well over a decade while they are still private. The public offering, once the starting line for an investor, has increasingly become a later chapter in a company’s lifecycle
The market has reshaped itself around that shift. According to Pitchbook, global unicorns have climbed to ~945, up ~9% since end-2025 with their aggregate post-money valuation reaching over $5.3T. By some measures, around two-thirds of that is concentrated within the top-ten private companies. The practical consequence is straightforward: when a company finally lists, the steepest part of its climb has often already happened in private hands. The public investor is frequently buying the chapters that come after the fastest growth for these large, established names.
This year's IPOs made it concrete
You don't have to take the thesis on faith. Look at the step-up between each company's last private valuation and the close of its first public trading day this cycle:
SpaceX was valued near $800 billion in a private tender at the end of 2025. It closed its first public day around $2 trillion — roughly 2.6x.
Cerebras raised privately at about $23 billion in early 2026, then closed its debut near $67 billion — roughly 2.9x.
Circle last raised privately around $8 billion and was up around 2.5x from that mark on its first day of trading, closing above $20 billion.
Fervo Energy priced its Series E at a split-adjusted price of $8.19 / share in December 2025, then IPO’d this year and closed above $41/share on its opening day.
These figures are illustrative and drawn from public reporting; they are examples of a market dynamic, not a promise of any outcome, and past performance is never indicative of future results. That said, investors who already held these names heading into the listing were positioned well for that step. The buyer arriving at the opening bell, by definition, was not.
Two complementary lenses on private markets
If that's the opportunity, the natural question is how an individual accredited investor actually participates. Mike and Gray framed the landscape as three complementary asset classes, each with a different risk-and-return profile: public markets, late-stage private companies, and venture-stage private companies. Most accredited investors are thoroughly built out in the first bucket and thin — often absent — in the other two. That gap, not a lack of capital, could be what holds a portfolio back.
There are two complementary ways to close it.
Late-stage secondaries, through PEP. Our focus is the window between private scale and a public listing — Series C and later companies, typically at $2 billion-plus valuations, that are on a credible path toward the public markets. We assemble one curated portfolio through a single upfront commitment, and we approach entry with discipline: pricing referenced to prevailing secondary-market activity rather than acquiring at any cost. It is how we have built exposure to names like SpaceX and Anthropic — referenced here to illustrate our sourcing, not as a complete list or a recommendation.
Early-stage venture, through Alumni Ventures. AV works at the other end of the journey — seed through growth — backing category-definers long before an IPO is even imaginable. That's where the compounding public markets rarely see actually begins. As Mike put it, the outcomes that dominate the headlines almost always start as small, early checks: Uber's journey from a roughly $200,000 seed to a public debut near $75 billion is the kind of arc that plays out almost entirely before the bell. AV frequently invests alongside firms such as Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Founders Fund.
The important word is complementary. These are not competing bets on the same moment; they are two lenses on a single journey. Held together, they let an investor build one private-market allocation that spans the full arc from seed to IPO.
The pipeline behind the headlines
It would be easy to assume that once SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI list, the private-market opportunity closes with them. The opposite is true. As the marquee names graduate to the public markets, a deep bench of pre-public companies moves up behind them.
At the large end sit names like Stripe, Databricks, and Anduril. The mid-tier includes companies such as Supabase, Whoop, Lambda, and Mercor. And a long tail of earlier, smaller companies — Deepgram, Tenstorrent, Modal Labs, Grafana, among many others — represents the next generation forming now. The opportunity isn't closing with this year's IPOs; rather, it is continually re-forming.
A practitioner's view, not a commentator's
What made the conversation worth an hour is that neither Mike nor Gray is a pundit narrating the market from the outside. Both are operators and investors who source, price, and execute in these markets directly. The message beneath the data was about discipline as much as access: getting into constrained opportunities is only half the job; entering at a sensible price and executing cleanly is the other half. In a year this loud, that discipline is the part worth listening for.
Watch the full conversation
The complete session — including the live audience Q&A — is available to watch now.
If it sparks a question about your own allocation, here's where to go next:
Late-stage secondaries: Learn how PEP provides qualified investors access to leading private companies approaching public scale at pep.fund, or reach us at investor.relations@pep.fund.
Early-stage venture: Explore Alumni Ventures' startup deals through the AV Syndicate — no cost, no commitment — at av.vc/syndicates.
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RESEARCH DISCLOSURE This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It represents independent thematic analysis prepared by PrePublic Equity Partners ("PEP") and is intended to discuss industry trends and company dynamics in the private markets. This content does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security or investment product. PEP is not a registered investment adviser or broker-dealer. Any offer or solicitation relating to securities will be made only through definitive offering documents to eligible investors. PEP and its affiliates may hold financial interests in companies discussed herein and reserve the right to trade such positions at any time without notice. Private market investing involves significant risk, including illiquidity and potential loss of principal. All data is sourced from publicly available information and has not been independently verified.
IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE This content is published by PrePublic Equity Partners ("PEP") for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute an offer to sell, or solicitation of an offer to buy, any security. No such offer or solicitation is made except by means of a confidential Private Placement Memorandum or other definitive offering documents delivered to eligible investors only. PEP is not a registered investment adviser with the SEC or any state securities regulator. Nothing in this article should be construed as personalized investment, financial, legal, or tax advice. All views are the opinions of the author as of the date of publication and are subject to change without notice. Private market and pre-IPO investing involves a high degree of risk, including illiquidity, potential total loss of principal, and reliance on unverified private company data. Past analytical observations are not indicative of future results. PEP and its affiliates, officers, or employees may hold financial interests in companies discussed in this article. PEP reserves the right to buy or sell such positions at any time without notice. PEP does not receive compensation from issuers mentioned in its research. PEP is an independently operated subsidiary of Alumni Ventures, LLC.
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