This Altcoin Project Opens the Door to Pre-IPO Investing: First Up, an AI Company!
Ondo Finance announced Ondo Private Markets, a platform that will offer investment exposure linked to the value of private companies, and expects its first product tied to an AI company to begin trading this week.
According to a statement reported by The Block, the platform will offer tokenized notes tied to the per-share value of selected private companies at certain liquidity events. Eligible investors will be able to transfer these products onchain and buy and sell them on the secondary market 24/7.
The first product will be tied to a private AI company. Products for companies in robotics, cybersecurity, biotechnology, and infrastructure are planned to follow.
Investing in a company’s value will not confer shareholder status
Under the new model, investors will not directly purchase company shares. The notes are issuer obligations designed to track the value of the relevant company; they do not confer ownership, voting, or other shareholder rights in the company.
This distinction is important for understanding how the promise of access to pre-IPO companies will work. The products will be available only to eligible non-U.S. investors in permitted jurisdictions.
Moving beyond publicly traded companies
Ian De Bode, Ondo’s interim CEO and president, said that 87 percent of companies with annual revenue exceeding 100 million dollars are privately held, and that the platform was created to expand investment access in this area.
The company had previously grown with products that tokenized publicly traded stocks and U.S. Treasury securities. According to Ondo, its platforms in these two areas have a total of 3,7 billion dollars in value locked and more than 1 million asset holders cumulatively. The new venture expands these operations to products tied to the value of private companies.
According to data from The Block, the market capitalization of tokenized stocks has surpassed 42 billion dollars, reaching approximately 35 percent of the 121 billion dollar tokenized asset market.