Private Equity & Private Markets

Advisor-only private markets infrastructure—iCapital is not a self-directed investing platform. It powers feeder funds and workflows that let advisors place clients into institutional alternatives at lower minimums, but adds an extra layer of fees and creates platform/advisor dependency.

North Capital is B2B private-markets infrastructure, not an investment platform. Individual investors meet it indirectly: it runs escrow and investor verification for crowdfunding portals, custodies customer funds and securities itself as a 15c3-3 carrying broker-dealer, a custody model most small firms outsource to large clearing houses ($18.0M segregated against $19.6M payable to customers at FY2026), and operates PPEX, the ATS where Arrived, Rally and (until December 14, 2026) Masterworks shares change hands (59,305 trades and $8.8M of notional in the first half of 2026, averaging ~$148 a trade). AltStreet's records scan found a six-entity regulated complex that got materially deeper in 2025-2026 (a second broker-dealer, a new SEC transfer-agent registration effective July 10, 2026, and a Treasury money market fund that grew 51% in three months) co-owned 25-50% by Franklin Templeton through FT Fintech Holdings, with one regulatory disciplinary event identified in AltStreet's records scan: a resolved, non-fraud 2024 FINRA AWC ($40,000) for late offering filings and unbalanced retail communications.

DealMaker is issuer-side capital-raising infrastructure, not an investment platform: companies run 'self-hosted' Reg CF and Reg A+ raises on their own websites using DealMaker's technology, with DealMaker Securities LLC as broker of record. AltStreet reconstructed its SEC Form C book (195 distinct Reg CF offerings involving 206 issuing and co-issuing legal entities since 2022) and read all four years of the broker-dealer's audited X-17A-5 filings. Three findings frame the review: roughly 86% of the Reg CF book is ordinary operating companies rather than the asset-backed vehicles most portals in AltStreet's coverage list; the broker-dealer's $21.4M balance sheet is 92-97% receivables from its own affiliates in every audited year, with $203,886 of regulatory net capital standing behind $20.6M of book equity; and a March 2026 Hunterbrook investigation documented DealMaker's marketing arm placing offering ads across eight mainstream financial newsletters that it reported carried no specific compensation disclosure, promoting issuers at 25x-67x book value. FINRA's record on the broker-dealer itself is clean: zero disclosures.

Alto is a self-directed IRA platform for private-market assets built from four entities: an administrator that says it is not a broker or adviser, a New Mexico trust company that holds the accounts, a placement-agent broker-dealer that runs an accredited-only marketplace, and a Tennessee exempt adviser that manages Alto's own SPVs. The company reports more than $2 billion under custody and 32,000 investors; the broker-dealer earned $528,723 in placement fees from issuers in 2025; Alto's own SPVs have sold $4.4 million across ten filings. In April 2026 crypto that Alto's new venue did not support was liquidated for customers who had not acted by an announced deadline, and on October 6, 2026 Alto agreed to buy Forge Trust, a custodian nine times its size, from Schwab.

Moonfare offers accredited US investors access to institutional private equity funds at $75K minimums, including KKR, Carlyle, EQT, Apax, Warburg Pincus, Vista, Hg, and Lexington. But AltStreet's 61-record catalog analysis found recurring disclosure-quality problems, the data room did not unlock in a verified KYC test, and the captive US broker-dealer's FY2025 revenue was mostly affiliate debt forgiveness rather than placement fees.

MicroVentures markets itself as equity crowdfunding, and AltStreet's reconstruction of its SEC record shows that channel is now close to dormant: 195 Regulation Crowdfunding offerings by 182 issuers, peaking at 38 initial filings in 2020 and down to 4 in 2025, with no offering open on the platform's own public feed on September 18, 2026. The business still filing steadily is accredited-only, a series of single-purpose Regulation D vehicles numbered in Roman numerals that had reached MVP LS FUND 685. The company publishes 'over $550M' raised on one of its sites and 'over $700+ million' on the other, with no reconciliation between them; AltStreet could verify $289,281,413 of capital sold through the platform's own offerings, and explains below why that is a floor rather than a refutation.

Linqto sold retail investors units in single-company vehicles holding pre-IPO shares, paused transactions in 2025, and filed for Chapter 11 in the Southern District of Texas on July 7, 2025. AltStreet rebuilt its Regulation D record: 1,231 Form D filings resolving to 546 offerings, $486,124,079 reported sold and 22,222 investor positions, and not one offering in the entire book ever reported 100 investors or more.

Sweater is a seven-person Boulder investment adviser that sells any US investor shares of registered venture-capital interval funds through a web app, SoFi Invest and Apex-powered brokerages, $500 minimum, no accreditation. Its flagship Cashmere Fund holds $16.6 million across 33 early-stage positions, has four audited fiscal years behind it (2.06% to 9.76% a year, 5.56% annualized since April 2022), has honored every semiannual repurchase offer for 5% of the fund, and carries a fee table of 9.32% gross and 4.95% net that the adviser subsidizes at a loss its own prospectus says negatively affects the adviser's financial viability.

AngelList, the administrator behind roughly 25,000 venture SPVs and funds for accredited investors, now sells any US investor a $500 share of USVC Venture Capital Access Fund, a registered closed-end fund advised by its own AngelList Asset Management that buys third-party SPVs and venture funds holding names like xAI, Anthropic and OpenAI. The filings show a fund that was 92% the adviser's own $8.1 million seed at its first audit, raised $29.5 million in the three months after its April 22, 2026 launch and stood at about $55.8 million of capital on September 25, charges 4.55% gross and 2.50% net under a waiver that runs to November 2027, held 39% of net assets in a government money-market fund and one position at 19% on June 30, and offers liquidity only through tender offers its board may decline to make.

Destiny Tech100 (NYSE: DXYZ) is a registered closed-end fund that any brokerage account can buy, holding late-stage private technology companies such as Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI mostly through special purpose vehicles. Its net asset value per share went from $6.44 at the end of 2024 to $34.30 at June 30, 2026, and the fund's own financial highlights attribute most of that to selling new shares above net asset value: $9.95 of the $13.49 rise in 2025 and $7.10 of the $14.37 rise in the first half of 2026 came from the at-the-market program, not the portfolio. That accretion raised net asset value for every holder already in the fund, but it did not translate into comparable shareholder returns: a shareholder who held at the market price lost 47.96% in 2025 and 15.90% in the first half of 2026, because the market premium compressed faster than net asset value rose. Management named the shelf behind that program as its principal plan for a going-concern warning at December 31, 2024, and the proceeds, together with portfolio dispositions, also remediated a breach of the fund's tax diversification test; at June 30, 2026 the program had left 57.5% of net assets in a money market fund, on which the adviser charges 2.50%.

Robinhood Ventures Fund I (NYSE: RVI) is a registered closed-end fund that Robinhood Markets seeded with $350 million, took public at $25.00 a share on March 6, 2026 in an offering underwritten by Goldman Sachs, with its brokerage affiliate Robinhood Financial distributing an undisclosed portion through IPO Access, and now advises through a wholly owned subsidiary for 2.00% of net assets with no performance fee. At June 30, 2026 it held thirteen private companies bought directly on their cap tables, led by Databricks, OpenAI, Mercor and Revolut, with 32% of net assets still in a money market fund, and a net asset value of $25.02 against a $24.05 audited NAV at March 31. The market did the rest: the shares closed at $73.71 on May 13, 2026, about 206% above the last published NAV, and at $24.81 on July 31, below it. Between June 3 and August 31, Robinhood Markets, the adviser's parent and the fund's largest disclosed holder, sold 1,233,062 shares for $38.5 million at an average of $31.23, against a seed cost of $24.62, and filed notice to sell more. Robinhood Ventures Fund II (NYSE: RVII), a business development company holding SAFEs in 79 Y Combinator companies with a 2.00% fee and a 20% incentive fee on realized gains, listed on August 13, 2026 at $25.00 and closed at $21.55 on October 2.