The Startup Category Pushing AI For Most In-Demand Stock
Defense tech startups led by Anduril are rising in interest on secondary market leaderboards. It's murkier who's really buying, or whether such buzz is good for the startups themselves.
It won’t surprise anyone to see Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a bunch of AI startups like ChatGPT maker OpenAI, search engine Perplexity and Musk’s own model provider, xAI, consistently rank atop the lists of most in-demand private tech company stocks.
Whether you think SpaceX is a value add at a $350 billion price tag, or OpenAI at $300 billion, their ability to make headlines and maintain fans means there will always be interested buyers, says Phil Haslett, founder of EquityZen.
“The wisdom of the crowds sometimes does work,” Haslett tells Upstarts. “They tend to go toward the name that’s out there all the time, and in a winner-takes-all market, it tends to be that name.”
The market maker has been tracking these trends for a decade-plus at EquityZen, founded in 2013 to make markets between early employees and other shareholders in buzzy startups who want liquidity – for a house, or maybe just an ugly statement car – and the retail buyers or institutions outside of the venture capital industry’s access network who are seeking access to such shares at close to their sticker prices.
Such marketplaces are only needed because selling startup shares before an IPO or acquisition isn’t so easy. While a handful of unicorns increasingly offer tender offers allowing long-time employees and early investors to cash out – SpaceX runs two a year, OpenAI ran one late last year and more recently, payments platform Stripe and Plaid – such sales are often restricted in how many shares can be sold and who’s eligible, with former employees and firms sometimes left out.
So EquityZen and others like Nasdaq Private Market and Forge Global have operated at the periphery, sometimes fully sanctioned by the startups, often tolerated at best. (There’s a reason that the 10th most popular startup on EquityZen’s latest ranking is labeled simply ‘Confidential Social App,’ and Haslett isn’t dishing who his firm is talking about.)
And right now the wisdom of their crowds, for better or worse, seems to function as something of a proxy for how much love companies are getting from tech fans and employees on social media like X: AI dominates. But another category is starting to make waves, not just at EquityZen but on other platforms, too – defense tech.