Augment

We just crossed $750M in AUM. When we started, we believed private markets needed better infrastructure. Today that belief feels almost quaint. We believe we're watching an entire asset class get rebuilt in real time. What's ahead: augment.market/blog/750-milli…

Arizona filed the first-ever criminal charges against a prediction market company, accusing @Kalshi of running an illegal gambling operation. Meanwhile, both Kalshi and rival @Polymarket are in talks to raise at $20 billion valuations — roughly double where each sat just a few months ago. The collision of criminal exposure and record fundraising ambition tells you everything about where prediction markets are right now. Read more in today's Pulse from @AugmentMarkets: augment.market/pulse/when-mar…

Private markets are shifting. Liquidity is becoming expected. Secondaries are going mainstream. The platforms being built for individual investors right now — not the ones being absorbed into banks — are going to define what this market looks like in a decade. CEO @noelregrets made that case at Match House at SXSW, interviewed by @smalera. The conversation is just getting started. You can follow along @TheAugmentPulse or sign up for the newsletter: augment.market

Bonus Deep Dive look at the coding agents private markets trade:

🚨 @RobinhoodApp's new private markets fund ($RVI) raised $658M and promptly dropped 11% on day one. Meanwhile, @Fundrise had its own Innovation Fund ($VCX) scheduled to list the same week—stronger portfolio, better fees—and quietly postponed. Two signals, one category. We’re digging into the structural "liquidity trap" of these products: what they get right, where they break, and why the lockup they’re trying to eliminate might actually be a feature, not a bug. All in today's Pulse from @AugmentMarkets: augment.market/pulse/the-priv…

Today's Pulse from @AugmentMarkets: Anthropic filed suit against the Pentagon over its "supply chain risk" designation — and the filing itself contains the most important number: the company's contracts are already being canceled, with hundreds of millions in revenue at risk. Meanwhile SoftBank's public stock is flashing warning signs about private AI valuations, and Nasdaq just announced the infrastructure that could eventually reshape how private securities trade. augment.market/pulse/anthropi…

OpenAI leads the No. 2 spot by a magnitude of almost 8 to 1. Publicly-traded appearances feature Google and Microsoft, but this list is dominated by privately held companies like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic. Retail investors are forced to wait for delayed IPOs and eye secondaries for access.

Episode 26 of Trading Places is here! @davemcclure and @amanverjee break down the week's top news, and analyze ByteDance at $550B valuation. Plus, @PitchBook’s @EMZheng47 and @CBInsights’ @saltzman_jason join to talk 2025 trends & 2026 predictions. Dive in 🤿 00:53 - [ tech & vc news ] 01:04 - @AugmentMarkets Power 20 🏆 01:53 - @anduriltech $4B raise on $60B 🛸 03:00 - @PalmerLuckey vs @DarioAmodei 🤼‍♂️ 06:30 - Iran war shocks @Nasdaq, oil, & IPO markets 💥🛢️ 11:28 - Can @cerebras IPO in 2026? 🤷‍♂️ 13:27 - @RobinhoodApp public VC fund $RVI launch 🏁 16:51 - Secondary deals hit $226B in 2025 🚀 20:17 - @DecagonAI tender offer @ $4.5B 💰 25:09 - @krakenfx connects to Fed 🐙 27:46 - [ intvw: Emily Zheng & Jason Saltzman ] 28:23 - Emily gives Pitchbook 2025 recap 🙇🏻‍♀️ 31:36 - Jason gives CB Insights 2025 recap 🙇‍♂️ 35:50 - Emily gives Pitchbook 2026 predictions 🔮 57:53 - Jason gives CB Insights 2026 predictions 🔮 1:00:56 - [ val corner: ByteDance @ $550B ] 1:01:20 - Sum of Parts analysis 🧩 1:05:09 - What is @tiktok_us worth? 💃 1:09:33 - China still controls algorithm 🇨🇳 1:12:53 - second takes 😂 Share @TradingVCs with a friend who’s tired of good VC podcasts.

.@SpaceX is reportedly preparing to file confidential IPO papers with the SEC this month — targeting a valuation above $1.75 trillion and a June listing that could be the largest in history. @anduriltech is raising $4B at a $60B valuation as defense tech capital floods the market. @OpenAI launched GPT-5.4 and hired IPO counsel, hitting $25B in annualized revenue. And @AnthropicAI's Pentagon standoff is still live — the company is back in talks with the @DeptofWar even as the supply-chain risk designation stands and @USWREMichael says otherwise. All in today's Pulse from @AugmentMarkets: augment.market/pulse/spacex-i…

Heading to SXSW? 🌵 Join Augment for two exclusive events! We’ve got an exciting lineup planned for Austin and we want to see you there. 🔥 Friday, March 13 (2:05 PM): Catch the Augment Fireside Chat at MatchHouse. We’re closing out the stage as the final panel of the day! 🔗 Details: matchhouse.events/partner/augment 🍹 Monday, March 16 (5:00 PM): "Let’s Get Liquid" at our Investor Happy Hour at Daydreamer, hosted alongside VC Village. 🔗 RSVP: luma.com/xxdiqmj6 Want to attend or invite a client? Space is limited! DM directly to get on the priority RSVP list. 📩

PitchBook just released its 2025 Annual US VC Secondary Market Watch. And they used Augment data to build it. Here’s what the numbers say about where the market sits: → $106.3B traded through US VC secondaries in 2025. That’s approaching the scale of IPOs and M&A as an exit path. Aka, secondaries aren’t a niche workaround anymore. As expected, SpaceX was the most actively traded name on Augment in Q4. It accounted for 12.5% of total platform activity. The market is still incredibly top heavy with the top 20 startups accounting for 86.4% of all secondary trading value. The top 5 companies represented 55.6%. When people say that “the secondary market is booming”… they’re right. But we’re really talking about the top 20 companies out of thousands. The mega-IPO wave coming in 2026 with SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, will pull those names out of the secondary market altogether. Short term, that will create a vacuum as secondary volume drops and bid-ask spreads widen. After that, more IPOs mean better price discovery across the board with tighter spreads and more confidence from buyers and sellers. The market gets healthier because the names everyone's been crowding into finally go public. Full report from PitchBook linked in the comments.

OpenAI just raised $110B. $30B from SoftBank. $50B from Amazon. $30B from Nvidia. Sam Altman said they looked at the growth curve and realized they didn't have enough compute to support it. The real story is that the demand signal is outrunning the infrastructure. The CEO of one of the most well-capitalized companies in history said, "we don't have enough compute." We're in a capacity constraint phase right now.

Today's Pulse from @AugmentMarkets: augment.market/pulse/the-fast…

@blocks laid off 4,000 employees—nearly half its workforce—and the stock surged 24%. CEO @jack called it a shift toward becoming "intelligence-native." Meanwhile, @OpenAI told investors it's targeting $280B in revenue by 2030, @nvidia's best quarter ever wasn't enough for Wall Street, and the week's biggest funding rounds signal capital is flowing away from software and toward the physical world: augment.market/pulse/block-ju…

1,000 trades on Augment. 🟢 Real buyers. Real sellers. Real prices. Real access to the private markets. This is what happens when you open the door. Let's go! 🚀

.@PitchBook's annual secondary market report is out, and the headline number is staggering: U.S. venture secondaries hit an estimated $106.3 billion in 2025 — rapidly closing in on the scale of IPOs and acquisitions. But perhaps the most interesting finding is the one that says the most about where this market actually stands: the margin of error on that estimate is $58 billion. Meanwhile, @stripe just repriced at $159B in a tender offer, and Wall Street keeps buying its way deeper into secondaries. More in today's @AugmentMarkets newsletter: augment.market/pulse/the-100-…

Today's @TheAugmentPulse newsletter:

A 7,000-word thought experiment from a Substack newsletter helped fuel an 800-point Dow selloff Monday, crystallizing Wall Street's deepening anxiety about AI disruption. And as of midnight, a new 10% global tariff took effect—creating fresh uncertainty for the 2026 IPO pipeline. Tday's Pulse, from @AugmentMarkets: augment.market/pulse/a-substa…