Caplight

6+ months since “Liberation Day” and Elon’s private empire is lagging. It's always a pleasure to partner with Yazhou Sun at Bloomberg, and I'm proud of the way this analysis came together! A link to Yazhou's article is in the comments. Here's the summary: Since April 2, 2025, a basket of Elon’s private companies has trailed the price performance of our Top 20 pre-IPO company index by 39%, according to our data (Caplight). In December, we published the Elon Index, an equal-weight composite of SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and Tesla. Price movement of the private companies is driven by secondary market activity. At the time we originally published the Elon Index, it had outperformed the Nasdaq by 3x since the November election. What a difference a year makes! 📉 Elon Index price lags since April 2 ‘25: - Caplight Top 20 Private Index up 50% - QQQ up 26% - Elon Crossover Index (includes Tesla) up 19% - Elon Private Index up only 10% What’s maybe more interesting is that private market demand for Elon companies has also declined, on a relative basis, year-over-year. Based on Caplight data. 🔻 Demand for Elon Index constituents drops: - $510M of bid volume for Musk companies in Q3 2024 - $100M bid volume for Musk’s companies in Q3 2025 But don’t worry too much for Mr. Musk! This year alone, his companies have added the GDP of Portugal (~$250B) in value, and slower gains this year might just be a correction after last year’s massive jumps. What’s your take? Long or short the Elon Index? DISCLAIMER: Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Investments in private companies are illiquid, as there is a limited secondary market for private company shares. #ElonMusk #PrivateMarkets #Investing

✋ Are you a junior VC? You’re likely spending 1,000 hours per year sourcing. 🤯 Are you sure those hours are well spent? VC is one of the fastest-growing customer segments at Caplight. That’s given me a front-row seat to one of venture’s biggest pain points: sourcing is still broken. This year, I’ve spoken with 100+ VCs, and the pattern is clear. Too much time chasing noise. Persistent fear of missing a company that checks all the boxes. Not enough time meeting the founders who matter. 🚀 Today, we launched Caplight 2.0 (beta), our solution to fix that. Full story in the comments 👇 Why is sourcing broken? Great VCs find great founders and build trust with them early. Great deals follow. But rising investors spend more time wrangling spreadsheets than meeting companies. Mapping markets, tagging companies to theses, scraping data from a dozen tools to qualify/disqualify companies... It’s grunt work that eats hundreds of hours per investment thesis. And in today’s market, you don’t have that time. Competitive deals are won in days, not weeks. And no one’s waiting for you to do your homework. Introducing Caplight 2.0 📈 An AI sourcing engine powered by our expanded private market data. Designed to give VCs everything they need to qualify/disqualify companies faster, and ensure they don’t miss a company that matches an investment thesis. Huge shoutout to Justin Moore and our engineering team for bringing this to life. (Shameless plug: we’re hiring rockstar developers, DM me or Justin with interest). With this release, our users get: ➕ More company data: Continuously updated profiles for 20,000+ private companies with business models, customer segments, sectors, and verticals. 📊 Funding round data: Over 60,000 venture rounds, complete fundraising histories, amounts raised, and valuation. 🎯 Investor data: 10,000+ firms and 100,000+ VC investor contacts, with visibility into which funds are backing which themes and companies. 🧭 Market signals: $300B+ in proprietary secondary transaction data and sentiment signals from news and social media. No matter how sharp your investment thesis, how well formatted your target list, or how creative your intro, if you meet founders too late, you lose. Cutting “time-to-coffee” puts your firm in a position to win the deal, and we're here to help. Caplight 2.0 is in beta. Sign up for a demo with me and request early access (link in comments). -- Disclaimer: This communication is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or investment products. All investments carry risk, and you may lose some or all of your investment. Consult with your financial advisor or an investment professional before making any investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. #venturecapital #vc #startups #dealflow #AI #privatemarkets #founders #VCtools #fintech #sourcing #productlaunch

What do EliseAI, Mistral AI, and Skild AI have in common? Hint: it’s more than *AI*. As Caplight grows, our coverage universe expands, and we’re excited to share a new cohort of companies with real-time pricing, now live on Caplight: 👩⚖️ Harvey 🏠 EliseAI 🏭 Crusoe 🦾 Cognition 🕵 Huntress 👩🔧 Mistral AI 🤖 Skild AI These companies are some of the most talked-about names in AI, infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Until now, price discovery for them relied on rumor, outdated last-round valuations, and sparse trade data. We’ve fixed that. Our MarketPrice™ algorithm now delivers real-time pricing, powered by data from executed secondary trades, buy/sell interest, fund marks, public comps, and more. Big shoutout to our newest teammate Joel Joseph Dominic, who joined to lead our data engineering efforts. Joel drove the addition of these names, and he’s just getting started. If you want coverage on a specific company, reach out. Our coverage universe is constantly expanding and we’re hungry for suggestions. #preIPO #secondarymarkets #liquidity #AI #venturecapital #secondaries #transparency Disclaimer: This communication is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or investment products. All investments carry risk, and you may lose some or all of your investment. Consult with your financial advisor or an investment professional before making any investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future returns.

How has the tariff-induced public market sell-off impacted your private company portfolio? 😵 Close your eyes if you're in the "private market prices only go up" crowd. If you're a markets junky like me, you've probably had a hard time looking away from your news feed over the past week. And, notwithstanding today's rebound, there will be long-term impact on risk assets. But keep in mind, it's going to be a while before public market volatility is fully translated into valuations of private companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, Anduril Industries. False statement: private market prices only go up. True statements: pre-IPO company prices go up and down. They are correlated with public market price movements, but often with a 3-6 month lag. I've noticed a repeated pattern over the past several public market corrections. This one is likely no different: 🛑 Pre-IPO stock prices typically don't correct immediately. Instead, the first thing that usually happens is new buy interest stops coming in. ❌ Around the same time, existing buy interest may often be canceled, and sometimes trades already in process are paused. 🥶 Seller price expectations can take weeks to months to adjust to investors' new risk tolerance. The question "what do tariffs have to do with my [insert innovative tech company] stock?" will be asked a lot. 🤝 Sellers will eventually capitulate. New trades will be agreed to. Prices reset. This price discovery process took 3 months during the last major correction of risk assets in 2022. Leading indicator? At Caplight, one indicator we use to estimate where prices are going is the Bid as a % of Total Interest ratio, which measures the amount of new buy interest versus total interest in the market. In periods where this ratio is below 30% for weeks, and public prices are volatile, we usually see private company valuations decline meaningfully. As of yesterday, our Bid / Total Interest ratio is at 40%. *But* that's down from 55% when markets were at all-time highs in February, so private market interest has been declining already for 1mo+. What do you think? Will private market valuations drop in lockstep with the public market over time? Shoutout to Rusty McDonough for putting this analysis together. This does not constitute an offer to buy or sell any securities. Please consult with your own counsel or financial advisor before investing in private company stock. #Liquidity #Transparency #PrivateMarkets #VentureCapital #preIPO #secondarymarkets #Data