#79: Pre-IPO Liquidity with Augment CEO Noel Moldvai

Craig Stephens (0:00)

The fastest growing companies are staying private longer, so the only way to participate in the startup economy is to invest pre-IPO. But where can investors find deals? In today's episode, I talked to Noel Moldvai, CEO of Augment, about how they are increasing access, transparency and liquidity for accredited retail investors. Welcome to the Access IPOs Podcast, where we explore opportunities to invest in the world's most innovative and disruptive pre-IPO companies. I'm Craig Stephens, founder of Access IPOs, and I've got a great guest for you this week. His startup is lowering minimums, increasing transparency, and giving platform investors liquidity. His name is Noel Moldvai, co-founder and CEO of Augment, a pre-IPO investing platform for investing in mid to late stage startups. You hear it all the time, private companies are staying private longer, and even companies that want to IPO are finding excuses not to IPO. We saw Aura delay or postpone their IPO just this week. In today's episode, we really focus on the Augment platform itself, how the deals are structured, how it works, what are the fees. And Augment has just launched the private liquidity network, which gives its platform investors the chance to sell their investments much more efficiently. Noel has a very interesting background as well. He was born in Eastern Europe, left a war zone with his parents to build a life in North America. He was an early employee at Rubrik. They IPO-ed in 2024, and that stock is more than 250% since its IPO price. And his experience trying to liquidate his early Rubrik shares is what inspired him to create Augment to build a better way to buy and sell private startup shares. His goal is to make pre-IPO investing as easy as it is to trade a stock on your favorite investing app. So this is a great opportunity to talk to somebody who is helping ordinary investors access some of these pre-IPO companies. If you stick around to the end, you'll even learn about our favorite Canadian rock bands. With that, let's get into the conversation. Noel Moldvai, co-founder and CEO of Augment. Welcome to the show.

Noel Moldvai (2:02)

Thanks for having me, Craig.

Craig Stephens (2:03)

So I was looking at your LinkedIn profile, and the title is CEO, but you also said you are a pre-IPO investing enabler. Tell us about your platform, Augment.

Noel Moldvai (2:15)

Yeah. Augment is the easiest way to invest in late stage private companies today.

Our mission is to make private markets accessible, transparent and liquid. And actually, we just recently launched our private liquidity network, which is essentially a network of buyers, sellers and infrastructure in between to enable people to invest in these companies as easy as you would on something like Robinhood, investing in public companies or crypto. And not just the investing fees, but also enabling the ability to get liquidity on those positions. Because as we all know, these companies are saving private for a really long time. And especially in the last few years, these companies have been growing faster than ever. If you look back four or five years, a $50 billion private company would have been massive. And just recently, you had $3 trillion private companies.

And so people, and when I say people, I mean institutional investors and retail alike are looking to not only invest in these companies before they IPO, but also get liquidity before that happens. If they're up multiples or there's some event, life event that they need to take care of and get liquidity for, or they just need to return capital to their investors if your fund and get DPI on that fund.

Craig Stephens (3:42)

So, tell us a little bit about the platform activity on there or volume, users, like what's happening on the platform today? Yeah.

Noel Moldvai (3:52)

So, we have about $2 billion of AUM on the platform today in 150 different investments with thousands of users and compounding. We're a direct consumer platform, so institutional and retail investors. And when I say retail, I still mean accredited, but we can go on to the platform today, look at offerings, and these are typically late stage private companies from the range of $1 billion valuations all the way up into, you know, trillion plus in the cases of OpenAI and Anthropic.

We started the company in 2022 as a brokerage, matching buyers and sellers, and kind of being a third party that is facilitating these transactions. We realized there was an execution problem in the market in that 50% of these deals fell apart. And so what we wanted to do was actually be in the path of the transaction, actually be in the flow of funds to make the execution process as seamless as possible, which is kind of an ode to the simplest way to invest in private companies.