In partnership with
Space Funding
Hey crew,
Jose here with another Space Funding Newsletter.
Happy Independence Day, what a great country we live in!☀️
May the 4th be with you 🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲
Let’s keep it short.
Wall Street Is Spending Billions to Reach the Investors You Already Have Direct Access To
Don’t Wait for the OpenAI IPO
OpenAI and Anthropic could be two of the biggest AI IPOs Wall Street has seen in years.
But investors don’t have to wait for those names to hit the public markets to get exposure to the AI boom.
MarketBeat’s 7 AI Stocks to Buy Now report reveals 7 publicly traded companies already positioned to benefit as the next wave of AI investment moves beyond the private model providers.
These are the stocks investors can buy today, before the IPO crowd rushes in.
THE BREAKDOWN
Every time I see a headline about a major institution launching a new product to give retail investors "access" to private markets, I think the same thing: founders using Reg CF have been offering that exact access directly to investors since 2016.
This week, the headlines were impossible to ignore.
So let's talk about it.
THE NEWS
The Race Nobody Told Founders About
This isn't a trend anymore. It's a land grab. Here's who's in it and what they're spending to get there.
BX Blackstone Building a 450-Person Retail Army
$302B already in the retail channel
Expanding to 450 private wealth staffers by the end of 2026, up from 325 today. Target: $1 trillion in retail assets. Their Q1 retail channel raised $11 billion — up 40% from last year. They have 18,000 advisors trained and 300,000 individual investors already in their products. And they're still calling it "just the beginning."
JPM JPMorgan — Launched a Retail Private Markets Fund
$4 trillion in assets under management
Launched a new private markets fund specifically designed to expand individual investor access to private equity. Managing $600 billion in alternative investments. Their stated thesis: companies are staying private longer, and individual investors deserve access before the IPO.
BLK BlackRock + Partners Group — New SMA for Retail Advisors
$49T target market, per their own filing
Launched a first-of-its-kind SMA in January 2026 combining private equity, private credit, and real assets — available on the Morgan Stanley wealth platform. The explicit goal: capture the $49 trillion sitting in high-net-worth households that currently has no private market allocation.
RH Robinhood — 150,000 Investors in Its First Private Markets Fund
Goal: retail in seed and Series A rounds
Robinhood's first private markets fund drew 150,000 retail investors. CEO Vlad Tenev said the long-term goal is to make retail capital "a big chunk" of seed and Series A rounds — so investors get in at the ground floor before valuations run up. His words, not mine.
Every one of those products puts a fund manager, a wealth advisor, or a platform between the retail investor and the actual company. The investor gets "exposure to private markets." The founder never meets them. Their data lives on someone else's servers. And the economics — fees, carry, management costs — get extracted before the investor sees a return. Reg CF skips all of that. The investor owns the company directly. The founder owns the relationship. No intermediary. No fee drag. No shared cap table with a fund that has its own agenda.
What's Working Right Now
Three Things I'm Watching This Week
🏦Institutional validation is the best marketing you'll ever get
When Blackstone, JPMorgan, BlackRock, and Robinhood all say "retail investors deserve access to private markets," they're educating your investor base for free. Every headline about private market democratization makes the next Reg CF investor conversation easier. The tailwind is real and it's building fast.
📊 The gap between what Wall Street offers and what Reg CF offers is your competitive advantage
Blackstone's retail investors own a piece of a fund. Your Reg CF investors own a piece of your company. They know your name. They've read your story. They bought your product. That's a completely different relationship — and it compounds in ways a fund allocation never can.
⏳ The window for being early is still open — but it's not going to stay that way
Deloitte projects US retail allocations to private capital could reach $2.4 trillion by 2030, up from roughly $80 billion today. The founders building retail investor communities now are the ones who'll have the most engaged, most loyal, best-distributed cap tables when that capital starts moving in earnest. Getting there first is the whole game.
"JP Morgan, Blackstone, and Robinhood are all racing to capture retail investor capital for private markets. Reg CF founders have had that direct access since 2016. The institutions just figured out what you already know."
Post this. Send it to a founder. Credit optional.
I wanted to keep this one short.
If you are ready to take your online capital raise, reply to this email or book a call directly with our team here
See you on Wednesday. 🚀
Jose Ruiz
Founder & Managing Director, Space Funding
Space Funding
Helping founders navigate Reg CF, A+, and D like pros.
www.spacefunding.us
