The TRUTH About Pre IPO Funds

Pre IPO Swap – (New York, NY 1/26/2019) – Pre IPO is when you transact shares of a company which is about to become a public company, a process known as IPO.  The Pre IPO market is for accredited investors only.  Popular names currently on the table include Lyft, Palantir, SpaceX, Klarna, Pinterest, and Stripe.  This is well known.

What is NOT known is how most companies are structuring this transaction.  They create a fund to do it.  So investors are actually making an investment into the fund – NOT into the shares.  What’s the difference?  Well for one, if something goes wrong – you have no rights.  Second, there are more fees – including but not limited to 20% of your profits.  And an exit fee.  That’s right – you have to pay up to 5% commissions when you buy AND when you sell!  Of course they will say – it’s all part of investing and if you make more than the fees then you are still ahead.  That’s fine – they need to eat too – but they aren’t providing any sort of advice or additional Alpha when you can get the shares directly without all the fees at places like Pre IPO Swap.

They are holding your shares hostage – for a huge ransom – 20% of your profits.

You don’t get on the Cap Table – they don’t even tell you what a Cap Table is because you are wrapped in an LLC which acts like an investment pool (this is the fund).  It tracks the shares as if you bought the shares – but you don’t actually own the shares.  So you are really investing in Example Pre IPO Fund LLC and not Palantir, SpaceX, Uber.

What do Pre IPO Swap purchasers all have in common?

• They understand value.
• They are looking for an edge.
• They are looking for that next disruptive technologies and companies.
• They value their time and they know that time is best spent with loved ones and enjoying the world’s treasures.
• They don’t need to look at quotes every minute because they purchased prior to the IPO.
• They have a vision of their financial future.
• They want to have control over their financial future.
• They recognize that finance is not a spectator sport.
• They (themselves, not through an LLC) get on the cap table.

So why do Pre IPO investors invest alongside billionaires?

Answer: Because they can!

What are some other problems with funds?  Funds can’t be hedged.  What does that mean?

If you own shares of an IPO which is about to go IPO shares will be restricted however the restrictions vary greatly in time and other details.  But you can always hedge your shares because you own them – they are yours.  That means you can sell covered calls on them, and many other things.  Here’s a famous example by none other than Mark Cuban, who protected 1.4 Billion in restricted stock during the sale of broadcast.com:

Back in 1998, Mark Cuban and his partner Todd Wagner sold Broadcast.com, a giant multimedia company focused on streaming audio and video, to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion. At the time, Mark Cuban received 14.6 million shares of Yahoo trading at $95, thus his concentrated position had a market value of $1.4 billion. In order to protect the value of the 14.6 million stocks he decided to set up a costless Options Collar, which allowed him to protect his billions without paying any insurance premium. Probably because there was a lock-in period for him to sell the Yahoo share, or he used these Yahoo shares as collateral for a bank loan, or he didn’t want to miss the opportunity if Yahoo continued to rally, he chose to enter a collar to lock in his share value without selling the shares.

This is one way to protect your position in Pre IPO without actually selling the shares.  But if you’re stuck in a fund – you can’t do that.  And there’s lots of other things you can’t do.  Hopefully you’ll make friends quickly with the other LLC members, after all you are all on the raft together.

And one more thing.  We shouldn’t presume to make statements about “Pre IPO Funds” as there are many and they are all different – there can be worse scenarios like fund specific lock ups, fees or penalties, and other features of a fund that are just the nature of being in them.

We’re not judging – we just feel that funds should be more forthcoming about explaining these nuances as it seems they are presented differently.  The language is clearly misleading however since investors must be accredited it’s ‘OK’ to use misleading language because accredited investors are supposed to know the difference between buying into a fund and buying shares directly.  But that’s not the point – investors just don’t know that it’s possible to do otherwise, that means the funds lead them to believe only through these fund vehicles is it even possible to get these shares – when that clearly is not the case.  Investors can transact direct and get on the cap table no LLC, and no 20% profit sharing fee.  (We note here, fees have their place – such as managed accounts, or a hedge fund quantitative strategy.  But sharing 20% of the profit from a single stock trade with your broker seems egregious.

To learn more about Pre IPO Investing, see www.preiposwap.com 

DISCLAIMER: FOR ACCREDITED INVESTORS ONLY

Raiders Of The Lost Corporate Ark - Revlon

Pre IPO Swap @ Seeking Alpha (Analysis Division) – 1/25/2019

Pre IPO Swap is now a contributor for Seeking Alpha, a site that is focused on actionable intelligence for securities.  Interestingly, Seeking Alpha does publish stories on Pre IPO which is why we signed up.   Our first article covers what could be one of the most interesting stock trading cases of all time.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE ON SEEKING ALPHA

Summary

• Revlon is controlled by a single insider for 30 years billionaire Ronald Perelman.
• Perelman has developed in his career a method of hostile takeovers that dates far before Revlon.
• Due to a rule, if he is able to get 90% of Revlon he’ll get voting rights of all 100%.
• The float (available shares for purchase) is low 2.29 M, almost all of which are held short.

Recently, Barna Capital purchased a 2% stake, putting the institutional control above 10.1%, making a Perelman takeover impossible.

Revlon (REV) is an American multinational cosmetics, skin care, fragrance, and personal care company founded in 1932 and based in New York City. That is commonly known; it is a brand name.

However, what you may not know unless you are a securities attorney is that Revlon is the cause of one of the largest and most significant corporate securities decisions of a generation regarding corporate takeovers. Revlon, Inc. v. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, Inc., 506 A.2d 173 (Del. 1986) was a landmark decision of the Delaware Supreme Court on hostile takeovers:

The Court declared that, in certain limited circumstances indicating that the ‘sale’ or ‘break up’ of the company is inevitable, the fiduciary obligation of the directors of a target corporation are narrowed significantly, the singular responsibility of the board being to maximize immediate stockholder value by securing the highest price available. The role of the board of directors transforms from ‘defenders of the corporate bastion to auctioneers charged with getting the best price for the stockholders at a sale of the company.’ Accordingly, the board’s actions are evaluated in a different frame of reference. In such a context, that conduct can not be judicially reviewed pursuant to the traditional business judgment rule, but instead will be scrutinized for reasonableness in relation to this discrete obligation.

This case is so significant in securities and corporate law that it has been cited 3,640 times:

And what’s interesting is that the guy who caused the case – Ronald Perelman – is still at the center of a shareholder dispute that started in 2013:

CLICK HERE TO READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE ON SEEKING ALPHA

Potential Trillionaire blows up 14 million flash crash loss

From the Slope of Hope: 

This is a tale of how greed and lack of risk management can blow up in a big way. Brace yourselves.

Allow me to introduce you to one Matt Todorovski, a resident of Australia who wanted to become a trillionaire - - yes, a trillionaire - - by sitting in front of his computer trading the FOREX markets.

Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with being ambitious, setting goals, and trying to beat the markets. Millions of people around the world do it, and the vast majority of them fail. It's a tough business. That's why the handful of winners make so much money. Because almost everyone else loses.

For years, Mr. Todorovski did plenty of losing. From his start in 2009 up through the beginning of 2018, his efforts yielded nothing but financial pain (being a resident of Australia, his reporting was naturally in Australian dollars, each of which is about 0.72 of a U.S. dollar). About a year ago, he was looking at lifetime "winnings" of about negative seven hundred thousand dollars.

Then, for reasons unknown to me, his trading luck started turning around. He finally wiped out his losses in September 2018, and then he started making..........profits! And, million by million, he proudly noted the date of each milestone. He also, strangely, decided that the sky was the limit, and he would put in placeholders for future profit milestones, up to and including $1 trillion. Because God knows the way to get ten times richer than Jeff Bezos is to trading FOREX on your personal computer.

This fellow wasn't shy about sharing the specifics of his account, either. He would regularly update followers on the various automated systems he was using and the gains or losses from each one. As shown below, he had amassed over $13 million in profits as recently as about a month ago.

And then, late in December, things took their first serious turn for the worse:

Perhaps to bolster his spirits - - and keep naysayers at bay - - he started amassing a bunch of bromides, motivational lines, and inspirational quotes.

And then, positive thinking notwithstanding, he losses accelerated.

As illustrated below, there was a big move in the USD/JPY, and this one-day wonder was enough to wreck the guy. (In just a few weeks, however, the damage to the chart vanished).

Which reminds me of a similar wipeout James Cordier went through with OptionSellers.com and its own centimillion-dollar wipeout. (Here, again, the destruction would have never happened if he had somehow been able to hold on just a few weeks).

But getting back to our hero in Australia..........having lost so much in such a short amount of time, and with public visibility, he started getting pounded with I-told-you-so style hate mail, some of which he shared.

Within the span of hours, he was wiped out. The entire $14 million of his account was gone.

You probably know where this is leading..........

Although he shouldn't hold his breath. Someone (maybe a relative) kicked in $100, and about ten days later some big-hearted soul augmented it with five dollars of his own.

I suppose the lesson learned here, at a minimum, is one that Matt expressed in his own "Methods Of Procedure":

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-21/trillionaire 

Jamaica's 37-Company Exchange Was 2018's Best Performing Stock Market

The Jamaican stock exchange, unknown to most of the world and which is open for trading only three and a half hours a day, was 2018's best performing stock market.

The exchange - which started 50 years ago, by Edward Seaga, a Jamaican Harvard graduate who worked as a record producer in the 1950s and 1960s - saw its main index up 29% during 2018, the most among 94 national benchmarks according to Bloomberg . Over the last five years, Jamaica's impressive market returns are even more pronounced: Jamaican stocks are up almost 300%, more than quadrupling the next national benchmark and outperforming the S&P 500 nearly seven times.

The blistering ascent of the local stock market took place despite real growth in Jamaica averaging less than 1% over the last four years; in 2018, growth in Jamaica was expected to come in at 1.7%. However, the small size of the local market has kept it relatively insulated from the broader economy, and helped Jamaican equities move as quickly as they have. As a result, the total value of the 37 stocks on the main index is less than $11 billion.

And now, capital is starting to trickle into Kingston as it tries to reinvent itself as a financial hub. Paul Simpson, a 36-year-old banker and investor in Kingston told Bloomberg:  “Clearly, capital goes where it’s comfortable. To see capital coming here means people must be comfortable." That, or they are simply hoping to recreate past returns.

The floor of the Jamaican stock exchange

The financial industry in the country is located mostly in the neighborhood of New Kingston. It isn’t a tourist destination like Negril and it isn't impoverished, like Trench Town. Instead, it’s an area where you’ll find Porsche dealerships and Starbucks.

Similar to China, over the past decade, the country's financial sector assets have tripled and its number of financial institutions have multiplied by a factor of eight.

It gets better: the World Bank now ranks Jamaica as the sixth best nation for ease of starting a business. Economist Uma Ramakrishnan, the IMF’s Jamaica mission chief said that "If I could hold a megaphone and tell investors now’s the time, I’d do it."

Still, before US hedge funds start arriving with dreams of massive alpha, the limitations of local stocks are pronounced, especially when one considers the small size of the market. Additionally, the shares available to the public are limited as many of the companies are mostly owned by large institutions and conglomerates. Like with Japanese government bonds, it is commonplace for some stocks not to trade for days and the number of unchanged stocks on a daily basis often outnumbers both gainers and losers.

In other words, in a world desperate for liquidity, Jamaica may not be your best bet.

Which is also why the managing director of the exchange, Marlene Street Forrest, is working on improving its logistics. Trades now settle in two days instead of three to comply with international standards and the exchange is looking to introduce market making this year. Margin accounts and short selling are both also on the agenda for the coming year  - yes, there is no way to short stocks right now, and in a throwback to more normal times there are no HFTs or ETFs (there are no Jamaican stocks in U.S. ETFs, even those tracking “frontier” countries such as Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, the most emerging of the emerging markets).

Still, the market is growing: there are 20 new IPOs scheduled for this year, and while the exchange evolving, as things often go in the islands, it's doing it at its own pace. 

“We ensure that we are going to get it right before we move,” Street Forrest said. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-19/jamaicas-37-company-exchange-was-2018s-best-performing-stock-market

Hedge Funds Suffer Massive $22.5 Billion In Q4 Outflows

While there were countless argument offered to explain December's near-record market drubbing, we said on several occasions last month that the simplest reason for last month's plunge was also the simplest one: faced with a mountain of redemption requests, hedge funds were forced to sell their holdings into a market that had never been more illiquid, which meant hitting each and every bid and culminating with the brief, December 24th bear market.

We now have confirmation, because according to Hedge Fund Research, investors fled hedge funds as markets plunged in the fourth quarter (or is that markets plunged as investors fled hedge funds), pulling a massive $22.5 billion, the most in more than two years. The exodus added to the total withdrawals of $34 billion in 2018, or about 1% of hedge fund industry assets, the largest quarterly outflow since Q4 2016 when investors redeemed about $70 billion.

Large fund outflows were concentrated in several firms which closed and returned capital to investors, with approximately two dozen firms experiencing net asset outflows of greater than $500 million for the quarter. Despite the overall negative trends on flows and performance, but reflecting the trend of larger hedge fund relative outperformance, approximately one dozen firms received net asset inflows of greater than $500 million for the quarter.

Flows by firm size also showed net outflows across all firm sizes, with firms managing greater than $5 billion experiencing outflows of $15.6 billion. Mid-sized firms managing between $1 and 5 billion saw outflows of $2.8 billion for the quarter, while firms managing less than $1 billion saw outflows of $4.1 billion.

"Hedge fund outflows in 4Q were driven by several factors, most notably investor reaction to steep losses in traditional asset investments and the sharp spike in equity market volatility leading to redemptions" stated Kenneth J. Heinz, President of HFR.

The spike in redemptions came as hedge funds suffered their worst performance since 2011 in a year marked by two corrections, a bear market, and a spike in year-end volatility.

Additionally, as Bloomberg notes, several big names exited the industry last year, including T. Boone Pickens, Leon Cooperman and Philippe Jabre, while virtually everyone else struggled to generate any alpha (with a few exceptions ). "Outflows also included several large fund closures," said HFR President Kenneth Heinz in the quarterly report, including instances of family office conversions and orderly, manager-initiated returns of investor capital.

Broken down by strategy, equity hedge funds suffered the biggest outflows, with investors pulling $16.8 billion in the quarter and a total of about $23 billion for the year, according to HFR. Hedge funds in this group fell 5.9% on an asset-weighted basis in 2018, the worst performers of all strategies tracked by HFR. Confirming that the redemptions were liquidity and not performance driven, even the year’s top performing macro managers, up 1.6%, ended 2018 with outflows of $12.3 billion.

There was a silver lining: event-driven (ED) funds brought in $6.4 billion in the quarter - the only strategy to see inflows - and $6.9 billion for the year, although performance weakness decreased total ED capital to $819 billion from the prior quarter. ED sub-strategy flows were driven by Distressed/Restructuring and Special Situations funds, which experienced inflows of $6.5 billion and $1.4 billion, respectively.

Fixed income-based Relative Value Arbitrage (RVA) strategies led industry performance in 2018, as the HFRI Relative Value Index (Asset Weighted) added +0.5 percent for the year, while the HFRI Relative Value (Total) Index posted a narrow decline of -0.2 percent for 2018. In 4Q18, RVA strategies experienced outflows of $5.4 billion, decreasing total RVA capital to $835 billion from the prior quarter.

"Trends in Macro, CTA, and RVA/Credit Multi-Strategies, and stronger relative outperformance of larger funds were all favorable throughout the intense market dislocations of December and 4Q. While the overall investor flows and performance trends were negative, it is likely that discriminating institutional investors which experienced or observed areas of strong performance through the most difficult equity and commodity trading environment in a decade will factor these positive dynamics into portfolio allocations for 2019."

With volatility set to return with a vengeance once this algo-driven bear market rally ends, 2019 promises to be just as challenging for the 2 and 20 crowd.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-18/hedge-funds-suffer-massive-225-billion-q4-outflows

Pre IPO Product Life Cycle – the Hamburger Analogy

New York, NY (PreIPOSwap.com) 1/17/2019 — Pre IPO Swap focuses on Pre IPO companies.  These are not necessarily ‘Unicorns’ but many are.  We get asked what is a private late stage mature company that qualifies for Pre IPO?  There isn’t a specific answer, some companies will be very late stage, others can be closer to the startup phase for example LYFT is not so old but already has filed for IPO.

We like to compare any business to food as it’s something everyone understands.  Let’s take the example of a Hamburger.  The first step in the cycle is the farm where the cow grows up.  Then at some point the cow is butchered and sent for processing.  Wholesale, the beef is then sold to food companies where it ultimately becomes a Hamburger and sold at McDonalds.  Finally, the end product is sold in thousands of locations across the world.  The last step in the process is garbage – capitalism produces a lot of garbage.  But science is inventing ways that garbage gets fed back into the system (for example, fertilizer).

So the question is – at what point do you want to invest in the company?  When it’s still a cow?  When the end product is being marketed on TV like McDonalds commercials?  Or in the cleanup phase?

We have called these steps in the cycle Growth, Processing, Branding, Distribution, Waste.  There are more detailed product cycles – this is simply to explain where Pre IPO is – typically it’s somewhere around Processing.  It’s the wholesale market.

When a company goes public – that’s the branding phase.  There is a road-show, the underwriter promotes the IPO so that when it hits the market there is interest (such as for Pinterest).

By the time the product – whatever it is – hits the end user (that’s the IPO) it’s been so watered down and over hyped it has little room for explosive growth.  And frankly, they don’t want stocks moving triple digits in a year it makes other stocks look bad.  They need to be tamed.  Companies that don’t fit the profile stay private.

With Pre IPO we are looking for just the right amount of risk and reward.  We want companies to already have been proven in the market – but before the marketing blitz.  Before the compliance changes that go on to fit the profile of a public company.  Ultimately, no matter what type of business you are – when you have to comply with rules it takes some of the zest out of your business; that’s usually a good thing.  Public markets allow capitalism to function at its best.  But for Pre IPO investors – they want to find the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ – not too risky, and just enough reward.  See our Pitch to learn more, or follow our blog.

CLASSIFIED: The most powerful investor you never heard of

Pre IPO Swap New York, NY 1/12/2019

Did you know that the CIA has its own Venture Fund?  And did you know that Venture fund was key in starting Facebook and Google?  As explained in the book Splitting Pennies – the world is not as it seems.

For many readers especially on Zero Hedge this comes as no surprise, as you are well aware of the octopus that wraps its tentacles around the globe.  But it may surprise you how active In-Q-Tel is and how chummy they are with the rest of the VC community.  It’s as if they are just another VC, but with another purpose.  Let’s look at some of the stats, from Crunchbase:

Here’s a list of recent investments…

If you dig back you won’t see Google or Facebook on there – which is company policy for retail consumer investments that can impact the public (it’s kept secret behind an NDA).  Here’s how it works – In-Q-Tel may invest in your startup but there’s a big catch.  First, you have to sign an NDA which is enforced strongly – that you are not to disclose your partner.  Second, you must agree to ‘cooperation’ when it comes to information sharing now or down the road, such as location data on people using Facebook, Google, or other systems – perhaps only to feed it into a big data brain at Palantir.  Or perhaps for more street level surveillance.  The surveillance is known by fact, not conspiracy theory – but by fact – due to the disclosure of classified documents by Edward Snowden.  If it were not for Snowden, we could only guess about this.  The name of the main program is PRISM but there are many others.

For those in the VC community that are deep in the know- the “Deep VCs” like Peter Thiel for example, the Snowden revelations would come as no surprise.  MUST READ – No Place To Hide – the story of the NSA, PRISM, and Snowden (written by Greenwald).

But for others, it may come as a surprise that not only the CIA has its own VC fund, but that it sits on many corporate boards alongside many Wall St. firms and other VCs.

And of course, they always do well.

Let’s consider the doors they opened for Google, or in the case of Google it was more like the doors that were closed.  Google was not the best search engine, it was not superior technology – it wasn’t even really very good.  It just became a monopoly and crushed the competition.  Many wonder how they were able to do it, and that this is part of the Entrepreneur “Magic” that few have.  Well we can say in the case of Google there was no Magic they had a helping hand from a friend in the deep shadows.  Google wanted to become huge – the CIA wants information (they always do, so we don’t use the past tense ‘wanted’).  So it was a cozy and rational partnership – in exchange for making the right handshakes at the right time, allowing Google to become a global behemoth, all they needed to do was share a little information about users.  Actually, a lot of information.  No harm in that, right?

But in doing so Google violated itself as well as prostituted its model and its users.  Google still does this and is not nearly as flagrant as its brother Facebook, however Google shares more detailed ‘meta data’ which is actually more useful to Echelon systems like Palantir that rely on big data, not necessarily photos of what you ate for breakfast (but that can be helpful too, they say).

The metaphor is making a deal with the devil; you get what you want but it comes at a price.  And that’s the price users pay to Google – they get service ‘free’ but at a huge cost, their privacy.  Of course – this is all based on the concept of Freedom which really does exist in USA.  You don’t have to use Google – there are many alternatives like the rising star Duck Duck Go:

But who cares about privacy; only criminals, hackers, programmers, super wealthy (UHNWI) and a few philosophers.

Google remains the dominant search platform and much more.  Google exploits niche by niche even competing with Amazon’s Alexa service.

The argument here is that Google wouldn’t be Google without the help of the CIA.  This isn’t our idea it’s a fact, you can read about it here on qz.com:

Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online.  The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.

There you have it – Google is the child of the digital revolution of the surveillance state.  Why spy, when you can collect data electronically and analyze with machine learning?

The new spy is the web bot.

And the investors in Google did well – so that’s the investing story that matters here.  It pays well to have friends in high places, and in dark places.  Of all the investments In-Q-Tel made, almost all of them have done very well.  That doesn’t mean that Palantir is going to grow to the size of Google, but it does provide natural support should a company backed by In-Q-Tel run into problems.

By the time Facebook came out, digital surveillance was already in the n-th generation of evolution, and they really stepped up their game.  In the creepiest examples, Facebook doesn’t necessarily (and primarily) collect data on Facebook users – it does this too.  But that’s just a given – you don’t need to perform surveillance on someone who gives all their data to the system willingly – you always know where they are and what they are doing at any given moment.  The trick is to get information about those who may try to hide their activities, whether they are real terrorists or just paranoid geniuses.

How does Facebook do this?  There are literally hundreds of programs running – but in one creepy example, Facebook collects photos that users take to analyze the environment surrounding.  Incidentally, the location data is MUCH MORE accurate than you see on the retail front end.  So you get the newspaper and see a gift in your mailbox for your birthday – you take a photo because the ribbons are hanging out.  What shows up in the background?  All kinds of information.  What the neighbor is doing.  License plate of the car driving by.   Trash waiting to be picked up by the street.  A child’s toy left by the sidewalk.  You get the picture.  Facebook users have been turned into sneaky little digital spies!  While they are walking around with their ‘smartphones’ (should be called ‘dumbphones’) scrolling their walls and snapping photos away – they are taking photos of you too.  That means, Facebook collects data for the CIA about users who don’t have Facebook accounts.  This is the huge secret that the mainstream media doesn’t want to tell you.  Deleting your Facebook account will do nothing – every time you go out in public you are being photographed, video recorded, and more – all going into big data artificial intelligence for analysis.

But here’s the best part.  You own it!  The CIA may have a bad reputation but it is part of the US Government, and thus – profits go back to the Treasury (those which are declared) or at least they are supposed to.  Considering this, why is there a stigma about even talking about In-Q-Tel when in fact we should be more involved in any US Government operation when it is technically owned by the people and funded by taxpayers?  Meaning, do taxpayers have rights to know what goes in in taxpayer funded entities, like In-Q-Tel?  The big difference between In-Q-Tel and the CIA is that In-Q-Tel functions just like any other VC – they disclose most of their investments, they attend conferences, they accept business plans.  You can literally submit your idea to In-Q-Tel and get funding.  Of course, like any VC there’s a very small chance of being funded.

So what’s an investor’s take on this story?  In-Q-Tel is not Freddie Mac there is nor a quasi-government entity; it’s not an NGO and there is no implicit guarantee that In-Q-Tel’s deals will do any better than Andreessen Horowitz.

However, their deals do very well.  Companies they fund not only have the backing of the CIA explicitly, it’s not only about business – it’s about national security!  Under that guise, it’s no wonder that companies like Google and Facebook rocket to the top.

We are not suggesting that investors double down on In-Q-Tel bets.  We are only suggesting that at a minimum, we follow what they do.  It’s a data point – a good source of information.  And the best part is that it’s public.

Their most recent investment is in a virtual reality company in Boca Raton, FL called Immersive Wisdom:

Immersive Wisdom® is an enterprise software platform that allows users to collaborate in real-time upon diverse data sets and applications within a temporal and geospatially-aware Virtual, Mixed, and Augmented Reality space. Immersive Wisdom is hardware-agnostic and runs on VR, AR, as well as 2D displays.  Regardless of geographic location, multiple users can be together in a shared virtual workspace, standing on maps, with instant access to relevant information from any available source. Users can simultaneously, and in real time, visualize, fuse, and act upon sensor inputs, cyber/network data, IoT feeds, enterprise applications, telemetry, tagged assets, 3D Models, LiDAR, imagery and UAV footage/streaming video, providing an omniscient, collaborative view of complex environments.  Immersive Wisdom also acts as a natural human interface to multi-dimensional data sets generated by AI and machine learning systems. The platform includes a powerful SDK (Software Developer Kit) that enables the creation of customer-specific workflows as well as rapid integration with existing data sources/applications.

Cool stuff for sure – but it’s in early stages.  Pre IPO Swap suggests real Pre IPO ‘unicorns’ not because of size, but because of the right mix of risk and reward.  https://preiposwap.com/pitch See why we think so in our pitch.

In any analysis, it’s worth watching In-Q-Tel, which is a top source of funding and investment data we watch on www.preiposwap.com  Pre IPO Swap.

To get real-time updates on companies like this, companies that In-Q-Tel invests in - www.preiposwap.com/follow   follow our blog free.