One of many causes I’ve been a long-time supporter and affiliate associate of Fundrise is its willingness to innovate. Since its founding in 2012, shortly after the JOBS Act opened non-public investments to retail traders, Fundrise has persistently appeared for tactics to democratize entry to institutional-quality investments.
From launching diversified non-public actual property funds like its Heartland and Earnings funds, to increasing into enterprise capital by way of the Innovation Fund, Fundrise has steadily pushed into areas that have been as soon as reserved for giant establishments and ultra-high-net-worth people.
So once I obtained an e-mail from Fundrise asserting its plans to checklist the Innovation Fund on the New York Inventory Alternate, below the ticker VCX, I used to be intrigued.
I are typically old-school with regards to investing. If one thing isn’t damaged, I’m usually reluctant to alter it. I’ve been an investor within the Innovation Fund since 2023 and now have over $700,000 invested throughout three accounts. My plan is to carry for the subsequent 5–10 years and journey the AI wave with a long-term mindset, largely with my youngsters’s future in thoughts.
Listed here are my preliminary ideas on the Innovation Fund doubtlessly itemizing on the NYSE after a day of digesting the information. I’ll replace this publish as I study extra and proceed to refine my views.
The Potential For Prompt Liquidity In Enterprise Capital
I’ve invested in conventional enterprise capital funds for over 15 years. That have has conditioned me to anticipate zero liquidity for a very long time. After I allocate capital to enterprise, sometimes as much as about 20% of my investable belongings, I assume I gained’t see that cash once more for at the very least 10 years.
The opposite 80% of my portfolio gives liquidity. Shares, bonds, and even cryptocurrencies could be bought if money is required or if alternatives come up. Enterprise capital, in contrast, is supposed to be affected person capital.
Fundrise already affords quarterly liquidity for the Innovation Fund, which is comparatively beneficiant by enterprise requirements. However offering that liquidity comes at a price, one I didn’t totally admire at first till I spoke to Ben Miller, CEO of Fundrise.
To satisfy quarterly redemption requests, roughly as much as 30% of the Innovation Fund has been allotted to liquid, lower-risk belongings corresponding to cash market funds and company bonds. These belongings present stability and liquidity, however additionally they dilute returns throughout robust markets.
For instance, in 2025, the Innovation Fund returned about 43.5%, pushed largely by distinctive efficiency from core holdings like OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, and Databricks. In the meantime, cash market funds averaged roughly 4% and company bonds about 6%.
When 30% of a fund is incomes a blended return nearer to five%, that acts as a significant drag throughout bull markets, very like holding extra money in a quickly rising portfolio. Throughout robust markets, there was little redemption stress anyway, as traders needed to remain invested and infrequently add extra.
An NYSE Itemizing Gives Liquidity And A Potential Enhance In Efficiency
That is the place the potential NYSE itemizing turns into attention-grabbing.
If the Innovation Fund have been publicly listed, the necessity to maintain such a big share in low-return liquid belongings may very well be considerably decreased. Liquidity would come from the market itself, not the fund’s stability sheet.
Primarily based on easy again of the envelope math, if that 30% beforehand held in low-risk belongings have been as a substitute invested alongside the remainder of the portfolio, total returns would have been near 60%, as a substitute of 43.5%. In different phrases, the 30% of the fund incomes a low-risk 5% dragged down efficiency by 13.5%. That could be a vital price to offer liquidity to shareholders who largely did not want liquidity throughout a bull market.
After all, markets don’t transfer in straight traces. Corrections and bear markets are inevitable, particularly in extremely valued progress sectors like synthetic intelligence. When costs fall, traders are inclined to comply with the herd, shopping for close to peaks and promoting close to troughs.
In a extreme AI correction, a privately held fund providing quarterly liquidity may face redemption stress it can not instantly meet. That may seemingly require gating withdrawals, which creates frustration and operational complexity.
A publicly listed fund handles this dynamic in another way. During times of intense promoting, the share value merely adjusts to mirror provide and demand. Traders should then determine whether or not promoting at depressed costs is smart, or whether or not staying invested aligns higher with their long-term perception within the underlying corporations.
Higher Credentials for Doubtlessly Higher Investments
Fundrise has been round for roughly 14 years and now manages over $3 billion in belongings. Whereas business actual property has confronted headwinds because the Federal Reserve raised charges aggressively beginning in 2022, these challenges are largely cyclical and asset-class particular slightly than reputational or operational. I am hopeful CRE has turned the nook.
Itemizing the Innovation Fund on the NYSE would additional improve Fundrise’s credibility and model. Getting listed just isn’t trivial. It requires in depth vetting by legal professionals, bankers, auditors, and regulators. All this requires money and time.
In some methods, it’s like getting right into a top-ranked college. It alerts the next stage of scrutiny, transparency, institutional acceptance, and total commonplace. In consequence, traders could really feel extra assured concerning the Innovation Fund, no more cautious. With higher confidence comes higher capital, and thereby extra funding alternatives.
After all, public listings don’t assure success. Poorly managed public funds nonetheless exist. However on stability, a NYSE itemizing sends a constructive sign that Fundrise is severe, sturdy, and right here for the long run.
For startups looking for capital, status issues. Founders consider traders not simply on capital, however on observe file, community, and skill to assist companies develop. In actual fact, one can argue that capital is a commodity as a result of there’s a lot capital sloshing round.
Fundrise Gives Extra Than Simply Capital
With over 380,000 traders, Fundrise has a distribution benefit that few conventional enterprise corporations can match. Portfolio corporations acquire visibility, potential prospects, and credibility just by being related to the platform.
I’ve mentioned this earlier than with Ben Miller, Fundrise’s founder and CEO, together with how partnerships just like the one with Ramp helped drive significant adoption by way of cross-promotion. Ramp (Innovation Fund holding) talked about to Ben it was one of the profitable campaigns that they had run. Now Ramp has zoomed forward of BREX, its closest competitor that began two years earlier, and was not too long ago bought to Capital One.
As an Innovation Fund investor, I clearly need the portfolio corporations to succeed. I’m one instance of an investor who may help amplify consciousness, and there are a lot of others who can as properly throughout the platform.
Examine that with conventional enterprise corporations like Sequoia. They’ve elite reputations and distinctive companions, however entry is proscribed to establishments, insiders, and a small circle of founders. Additionally they can not immediately attain a whole lot of 1000’s of engaged retail traders the way in which Fundrise can.
Fundrise can be a non-public firm operator itself, utilizing and testing merchandise from its personal portfolio. For startups evaluating potential traders, that mixture of capital, platform, and operational perception is compelling.
Itemizing on the NYSE additional legitimizes that proposition.
Right here’s my podcast episode the place I talk about the accelerating adoption of AI and the Ramp partnership with Ben Miller, CEO of Fundrise.
The X-Issue: Premium or Low cost to Web Asset Worth (NAV)
Earlier than going additional, it’s value clarifying what internet asset worth, or NAV, really means on this context.
NAV represents the per-share worth of the fund’s underlying belongings minus liabilities. In easy phrases, it’s the estimated worth of all the businesses and belongings the Innovation Fund owns, divided by the variety of shares excellent. When a fund is non-public, traders sometimes transact at or very near NAV.
As soon as a fund is publicly listed, nevertheless, a second power comes into play: market provide and demand for the fund’s shares.
Whereas NAV continues to be pushed by the efficiency and valuation of the underlying portfolio corporations, the buying and selling value of the fund can transfer above or under NAV relying on investor sentiment, liquidity preferences, and shortage. This distinction exhibits up as a premium or low cost to NAV.
Traditionally, many closed-end funds, particularly these invested in illiquid belongings like actual property that’s harder to promote, have traded at reductions to NAV, typically within the 5% to 10% vary. The explanations are normally sensible slightly than dramatic, starting from liquidity preferences and valuation uncertainty to skepticism about administration or the inconvenience of proudly owning a fund as a substitute of the belongings themselves.
That stated, shortage can flip the equation.
If demand for publicity to a selected set of personal corporations far exceeds the accessible float of shares, the fund’s market value can commerce meaningfully above NAV. In these circumstances, value actions are pushed much less by adjustments within the underlying firm valuations and extra by provide / demand imbalances within the public market.
This dynamic already exists in pockets of the market. Some publicly traded automobiles with concentrated publicity to hard-to-access non-public corporations have traded at sustained premiums, typically properly above the worth of their underlying holdings.
For the Innovation Fund, this creates an extra variable for traders. Returns would now not be pushed solely by how properly the portfolio corporations carry out, but additionally by how the market costs entry to these corporations at a given second in time.
In different phrases, the worth of the underlying belongings nonetheless determines NAV, however the market’s urge for food for publicity determines whether or not traders should buy or promote shares at a reduction or premium to that NAV. The more durable to achieve entry to the portfolio corporations, doubtlessly, the upper the premium to NAV.
As a long-term investor, I assume the fund will commerce roughly round NAV, probably at a modest low cost. However as a result of the Innovation Fund owns scarce non-public belongings and will have restricted public float (8% or much less), there may be additionally a believable state of affairs the place demand drives the share value to a premium, at the very least for durations of time.
That extra layer of provide and demand cuts each methods. It introduces volatility, however it additionally creates upside optionality that doesn’t exist in a purely non-public construction.
Instance Of A Closed-end Fund Buying and selling At A Premium To NAV: DXYZ
There may be clear precedent for publicly traded funds buying and selling at premiums to NAV. One notable instance is DXYZ, or the Future Tech100 Inc. fund, which has traded at anyplace from a 200% to 350% premium to its internet asset worth. Again in November 2025, the fund’s NAV was roughly $7 per share, and it’s seemingly larger right this moment.
SpaceX accounts for about half of DXYZ’s holdings, which affords a powerful indication of simply how a lot demand there may be for hard-to-access SpaceX publicity. Traders are successfully paying a considerable premium for comfort, shortage, and perceived long-term optionality.
As a savvy investor, it’s cheap to take a look at DXYZ and ask whether or not one thing comparable may occur if the Innovation Fund have been to grow to be publicly traded. Primarily based on fund paperwork from September 2025, Databricks, OpenAI, and Anthropic collectively made up roughly 50% of the Innovation Fund’s portfolio. The remaining portion consisted of different high-quality non-public corporations corresponding to Canva, Anduril, Ramp, and SpaceX as properly. It is simply the scale of their SpaceX possession within the fund is small (~1.2%).
One may argue that the Innovation Fund affords a extra diversified combine of personal progress corporations with much less focus danger than DXYZ, which I desire. If that’s the case, it’s not unreasonable to think about a state of affairs the place the Innovation Fund may commerce at a significant premium as properly, particularly given how tough it’s for many traders to achieve publicity to those corporations immediately.
NAV Might Additionally Decline As Effectively
That stated, premiums to NAV usually are not assured and could be unstable. Investor sentiment can shift rapidly, notably throughout market corrections or durations of rising rates of interest. Premiums can compress simply as quick as they develop, even when the underlying corporations proceed to carry out properly. As soon as the 6-month lockup interval expires, it’s rational to anticipate any NAV premium to vanish and a reduction to emerge. It will likely be as much as Fundrise to correctly handle the float as a closed-end listed fund.
As well as, a extra diversified portfolio could scale back focus danger however may dilute the shortage impact that drives excessive premiums. In contrast to DXYZ, the place SpaceX dominates the narrative, the Innovation Fund’s broader publicity could lead on the market to worth it extra conservatively.
The entire non-public corporations held within the Innovation Fund stay scarce and tough to entry, even for well-connected traders. In the meantime, ServiceTitan, now publicly traded below the ticker TTAN, represents lower than 2% of the fund (not 15% as proven within the graphic), reinforcing that the portfolio stays targeted on non-public progress alternatives slightly than public market publicity.
Taken collectively, a premium is believable, however it needs to be considered as elective upside slightly than a base-case assumption. For long-term traders, the first driver of returns ought to nonetheless be the efficiency of the underlying corporations, with any premium to NAV handled as a bonus slightly than a assure.
Let’s Make A Reasonable Assumption Of NAV Potential For VCX
Let’s assume there’s a 50% probability the fund trades at a ten% low cost to NAV, a 20% probability it trades at par, and a 30% probability it trades at a 50% premium (not 200% – 350% premium like DXYZ, which I would not purchase). Beneath these assumptions, the anticipated worth of a $100,000 funding made earlier than itemizing could be about $110,000.
Even with the next likelihood of buying and selling at a reduction, that form of uneven payoff remains to be the kind of danger I’m comfy taking as a long-term investor. It’s best to play with the assumptions your self to determine a number of sensible eventualities.
Personally, I don’t plan to promote for at the very least one other 5 years, and ideally ten. My objective is to take a position till my children graduate school in about 16 years to hedge towards a doubtlessly bleak labor market because of AI. Time and compounding are on my facet. So the 6-month lockup publish a profitable VCX itemizing just isn’t a priority.
Given the tax implications of promoting, I would wish a major premium to NAV to be tempted. If I imagine the fund can compound at 20% yearly for 5 years, that’s roughly a 150% acquire simply by holding.
In that case, promoting solely is smart at a big premium and with confidence I may redeploy the after-tax proceeds simply as successfully. In any other case, like many rich traders, I’d slightly borrow towards belongings than promote them and pay taxes.
If the fund have been to commerce at an excessive premium, say 100% above NAV after the 6-month lockup, I would promote 25% of my place to lock in positive factors and let the remaining 75% journey. That may be a miraculous ~$700,000 appreciation on my ~$700,000 complete place simply by way of a list. Taking some income balances prudence with long-term conviction.
And if VCX trades at a reduction to NAV, my base case state of affairs, I am going to simply maintain like initially deliberate with the expectation the low cost will slender as visibility of VCX improves and Fundrise higher manages the operations of the fund.
Constructing Transparency, Liquidity, and a Model
Having constructed Monetary Samurai since 2009, I perceive how tough it’s to develop a enterprise and a model. Typically momentum builds rapidly. Different instances you get dragged by way of the mud and endure. That volatility is solely a part of constructing one thing significant.
Fundrise’s try to checklist the Innovation Fund on the NYSE represents a step towards higher transparency, liquidity, and model sturdiness. It could additionally enhance entry to higher-quality offers over time, which is the primary objective for each Fundrise and its traders.
The payment construction stays engaging. With the ability to put money into non-public progress corporations of this high quality with out paying a 20% carry is uncommon. One closed-end enterprise fund I put money into expenses 3% administration charges and 35% of income. By comparability, Fundrise’s new 2.5% payment with no carry is compelling.
The primary problem for traders, myself included, might be staying disciplined by way of public itemizing volatility. Larger liquidity makes it simpler to promote throughout downturns and to justify poor timing selections with convincing narratives. I could make each a bull and bear case for nearly any place I maintain, having educated myself to take a look at either side in an effort to keep away from being blindsided.
And there might be a correction in AI non-public corporations in some unspecified time in the future. The actual check might be whether or not traders can maintain by way of volatility and even purchase the dip in the event that they imagine, as I do, that AI is at the very least a decade-long pattern.
Investing In AI For The Lengthy-Time period
Total, I’m excited to see what occurs. With a minimal funding quantity of solely $10, gaining publicity to the Innovation Fund is simple. If the itemizing doesn’t materialize, I’m proud of the established order. And if Fundrise launches new funds investing in promising non-public progress corporations, I’ll be keen to guage these alternatives as properly. Both approach, I’ll proceed to be a long-term investor within the Innovation Fund.
After the announcement, I made a decision to take a position an extra $3,000 after my month-to-month $1,000 auto funding. For over a yr, I have been reinvesting a few of my rental earnings into the fund. What I used to be pleasantly shocked to see was a $2,537.48 year-end dividend.
Readers, what do you consider the Innovation Fund doubtlessly itemizing on the NYSE? Do you anticipate it to commerce at a premium or a reduction to NAV over time? And would you take into account investing earlier than a list to doubtlessly profit from any NAV growth pushed by provide and demand?
Fundrise has been a long-time sponsor of Monetary Samurai, and I’m additionally an investor in Fundrise merchandise. I’ve spoken with and met Ben Miller, Fundrise’s co-founder and CEO, many instances through the years, and our long-term funding philosophies are intently aligned.
As with all danger belongings, there aren’t any ensures. Please make investments solely what you may afford to lose and guarantee your total asset allocation means that you can keep disciplined by way of market cycles.
