FULL TRANSCRIPT
Slava Rubin (00:00)
Thank you everybody for joining. We're bringing the band back together by popular request. We're gonna do another five pre-IPO companies you need to know about. We did one of these sessions a little while back. We covered five companies. Everybody said, wow, that was a really good session. Can we do it again with more companies? So here we are. My name is Slava Rubin. I'm one of the founders here at Vincent. We're looking to democratize access to alternative investments like pre-IPO. And I have with me,
None other than the famous Jan-Erik from Sacra Jan-Erik, say hi.
Jan-Erik Asplund (00:30)
You're the famous one, but thank you. Hello. Great to be back.
Slava Rubin (00:34)
Absolutely, we're gonna be covering five awesome companies. We'll dive into that in just a second. And this session is brought to you with our partner, the Fundrise Innovation Fund. Next slide.
So before we get started, we covered this slide in our previous session, so we won't spend too much time, but pre-IPO is very active right now. There's a lot of companies valued at all kinds of incredible valuations, less public companies than ever. So all kinds of folks are trying to get into these in various ways. There's Reg D, SPVs, the 40 Acts and of course, marketplaces.
There have been a ton, there's been a ton of activity in the last couple weeks, really months, where you're seeing companies like Forge get bought, EquityZen get bought. Industry Ventures just got bought by Goldman Sachs. So there's all kinds of action where folks are trying to get into this place of pre-IPO companies.
trying to get more alpha earlier before these companies go public. So these are some of your options and of course, Fundrise, our partner for today's session is also one of your options via their 40 act fund. With no further ado, let's dive into our five companies. So for today's menu, we have Ramp, OpenEvidence, Apptronik Whop and Shield AI. I mean, we're covering all kinds of stuff here.
Some of you know all of these five companies very deeply. Some of you might just know a couple of these companies and some of these names are brand new to you. We're going from a FinTech company to an AI company in the medical space to ⁓ full-on robotics to a Gen Z commerce company to defense tech. So we're covering all types of industries. Let's take this moment to actually do a quick poll.
So let's see if this can actually work. We're gonna throw up a poll. there you go. So for all you folks in the audience, based on what you know right now, what little or much you know about each of these companies at their current valuation, whether you know it or not, which of these companies are you most bullish about? So try not to pick more than
three companies. So we want to just see where your votes land right now. That doesn't mean that more expensive is most bullish, meaning where would you want to put your dollar right now? And we'll check again at the end of the session based on all the new information that you get. So let's give everybody 30 seconds to vote.
Wow, I'm not even allowed to vote.
Jan-Erik Asplund (03:08)
⁓ I was just gonna say, can't believe panelists can't vote.
Slava Rubin (03:12)
a lot about.
Jan-Erik Asplund (03:12)
Shame.
Slava Rubin (03:12)
So somebody asked the timeframe. So if you were looking to make money by 2030, or if you're looking to make money in the next year or two, whatever time horizon you would like to use that you're most bullish, that you have your $100, your $1,000, your $1 however many zeros you want, which companies are your most bullish here, maximum of three. All right, 10 seconds Left.
Awesome.
All right, here are the results. first place is Shield AI, the defense tech company. Then you have Ramp, interesting. OpenEvidence, Apptronik actually a bit higher than that and only one person picked Whop. Super interesting. All right, let's just put a pin in that and move forward with these five companies.
So let's start with Ramp
All right, Jan-Erik, do wanna give us a quick overview on Ramp?
Jan-Erik Asplund (04:02)
Definitely. Ramp was founded back in 2019. the really the origins of the company, for Ramp, also for competitor Brex kind of are rooted in this idea of a startup credit card. you know, the way it's always been is that as a startup, you might have a fair amount of cash in the bank from, raising money, but you'd often don't have a lot of cashflow or revenue coming in. And that makes it challenging to get a bank from a
I'm sorry, get a card from a traditional bank. Often you're putting personal guarantees on there, all that kind of stuff. So Ramp Brex, this wave of companies started with this product market fit of like credit cards for startups based on your bank balance, based on having raised money. Although they sort of evolved very quickly from there into doing more than just corporate cards. So going into expense management, bill pay, procurement, treasury over time.
Ramp specifically started out with a slightly modified kind of wedge, which was that it was a credit card that you could get as a startup that would, you know, very little emphasis on sort of rewards or cash back and more emphasis on helping you save money. So identifying, you know, when you can get a cheaper price on a contract.
⁓ expense management to help you limit your spend on cards, programmatically give virtual cards where only certain kinds of purchases are allowed across your team. And that was really their big value prop. And the company has done really really well regarded sort of product team, engineering team. as of August this year, they hit a billion annualized revenue. They just raised money at
$32 billion valuation. So value at 32X, as you saw from the poll, they're very widely considered to be one of the most exciting kind of pre IPO companies taking on some of the sort of biggest names in legacy enterprise financial SaaS like SAP, ⁓ Concur, Coupa, Bill.com, these kinds of companies. And not to mention, Amex. ⁓
Slava Rubin (06:05)
So they just raised that $32 billion valuation. I that's a pretty monster valuation. Weren't they, they were substantially lower than that, right? Previous to the 32.
Jan-Erik Asplund (06:15)
Yeah, I'd have to check. think it was about doubling the evaluation from actually earlier this year, like middle of this year.
Slava Rubin (06:23)
mean, that's pretty incredible. Where is that billion dollars of revenue? Where is the majority of that revenue coming from? What would be the one first and second line items on that?
Jan-Erik Asplund (06:33)
Yeah, exactly. the primary source of revenue for Ramp is still going to be interchange. So basically, people spending money on cards, collect a take rate on every transaction that happens on those cards. And their transaction volume is huge, I think, roughly like $60 billion.
for the entire year of 2024. That's the majority, although in recent years, especially over the last year, they've been getting, from our understanding, much more SaaS revenue. So if you, for example, use some of these different SaaS products they have, like BuildPay and others, then you're paying an extra sort of monthly cost on that. And then there was a lending product, so there was some financing revenue involved, but.
primarily the interchange take rate on people spending on Ramp cards.
Slava Rubin (07:30)
And for prospectus, is it fair that Brex is kind of their main competitor at the moment, even though there's a bunch of competition, when people talk about Ramp, they often talk about Brex because they have kind of the same vintage in terms of like their, when they went to market. Is that a fair competitor to think about?
Jan-Erik Asplund (07:47)
Yeah, I do. think it's interesting. They were much closer earlier on. Their paths have sort of diverged where Ramp is kind of a little more mid-market startup and mid-market and a little more of an all-in-one where you come to Ramp, you do your treasury procurement, bill pay expenses. Brex has actually kind of started to go more in a, they do that, but they're also going more enterprise and more embedded.
So now you see like, for example, Brex credit card issuing tech is what's powering the card offerings of Navon and a few of these other sort of really big enterprise financial SaaS. So there is a bit of a divergence, however, it's still sort of the clearest competitor. And then I would say also these kinds of some of these public companies like Coupa for procurement, spend management, bill.com for bill pay are more and more
competitive with Ramp now.
Slava Rubin (08:46)
And then let's say we were trying to into Brex. Do you have a sense of Brex revenue and valuation at the moment just for comparison sake?
Jan-Erik Asplund (08:53)
I do. So Brex revenue, actually broke this news at Sacra was 700 million annualized as of August. just a step behind 300 million behind Ramp valuation, I believe is still roughly 12 billion. That's from their 2022 round. So 12, 700, that's about a 17x multiple. So that's roughly.
Slava Rubin (09:20)
So if it's possible to get into Brex, potentially it's cheaper at the moment, if it's possible to get into those prices.
Jan-Erik Asplund (09:27)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Slava Rubin (09:30)
Interesting.
We have a question. Do you know Nitra, which is doing essentially Ramp specifically for healthcare?
Jan-Erik Asplund (09:37)
I hadn't heard of it, but it's very interesting. yeah, I'll definitely look at this. I'm seeing it now that it's, yeah, expensive intelligence payments for healthcare. No, but yeah.
Slava Rubin (09:50)
Interesting. a billion dollars of revenue is obviously a company that has some momentum. If you were looking at the legacy players, you know, it's already worth $32 billion. Are they looking to, you know, by 2030 or 10 years from now be the new Amex? Like, where do you see, you know, a market leader? Who do they become if they crush it?
Jan-Erik Asplund (10:13)
Yeah, it's interesting. They're really going very strong on AI. They were one of the first open AI partner companies out there. it's been a huge emphasis that they have AI agents that are on the roadmap is basically automating accounts payable, accounts receivable, helping you close your books, managing procurement, sort of a full financial back office.
suite automated with AI. I think a few years ago, I would have thought AMEX was, and we wrote a memo about taking on AMEX. And that still feels relevant, I think, as a corporate card, sort of centered company. Everything revolves around the card, right? Every piece of data comes out of how the card is used. So it's still core, and I still think AMEX is, in that sense,
like a big competitor to take down. But I think it's expanded to where a brand might consider these like Concur and Coupa to be just as big in terms of what they want to be. Or what they want to be might even be kind of a combination of those, right? To where they can own that entire market.
Slava Rubin (11:21)
What's concurred is market cap right now.
Jan-Erik Asplund (11:23)
as part of SAP, ⁓ yeah, they're huge in terms of, this like travel and expense. ⁓ they're probably the biggest in travel and expense.
Slava Rubin (11:25)
Okay, so it doesn't happen so much.
Right, right, right. looks like five billion market cap. then Coupa, is Coupa public?
Jan-Erik Asplund (11:40)
Um, they are not anymore. Uh, they were taken private for 8 billion, uh, a few years ago.
Slava Rubin (11:47)
So what are your predictions for like 2030? What do you think RAMP can look like? Kind of like a base case or an optimistic case?
Jan-Erik Asplund (11:56)
Yeah, think the 2030 base case, probably like a 4 billion. I mean, the growth has been insane at scale. Yeah, Which, yeah, mean, they've been growing, they've been more than doubling every year. And they're on track to more than double this year, which is actually kind of insane growth at their scale.
But so I think, know, base case for a 4 billion slight deceleration by 2030. And then bull case would be, you know, they keep doing this and maybe hit like nine, 10 billion. Base case probably worth like 50 billion bull case probably worth like 150, which is them, you know, as kind of this like fully automated financial back office.
Slava Rubin (12:45)
Sorry, case, four billion, sorry, base case.
Jan-Erik Asplund (12:48)
For revenue, yeah.
Slava Rubin (12:49)
worth 50, so the multiple has come down significantly.
Jan-Erik Asplund (12:53)
I would say at four in 2030, yeah, the growth would have decelerated at scale and they would be, valuation would be much lower. The multiple would be much lower.
Slava Rubin (13:03)
Right, and if they do keep this crazy growth and they do 8 billion of revenue, you think what kind of multiple?
Jan-Erik Asplund (13:10)
Yeah, I had sort of sketched it as, you know, 8 billion revenue, 150 billion in terms of valuation, which would be like a 19x. I think I feel good about that.
Slava Rubin (13:23)
Yeah, I guess my key takeaway here is people get excited about Ramp. think ramps an amazing company. I think it's very expensive. 32 X is not anything to laugh at. FinTech companies usually don't get these types of multiples. Nevertheless, a software FinTech. So this is definitely nosebleed territory. So you need to be careful about what you're expecting to happen. So can this become a $500 billion company? It's possible. There's not a lot of that in
out in the world for this space. So I think you really need to lean forward into its AI chops and to really be an AI company around data that happens to have FinTech data. But yeah, I think it's an amazing company. Just know that you're coming in at a pretty high price. All right, should we jump into the next company?
Jan-Erik Asplund (14:08)
Let's do it.
Slava Rubin (14:09)
All right, completely changing gears. We're sticking with now more AI, but not just open AI. We're talking about Open Evidence, which is for simplicity sake, chat GPT for doctors. I would assume most people have not even heard of this company a few months ago. And now it's throughout the news, literally last week, talk about doubling its valuation. talk to me, Jan-Erik
Jan-Erik Asplund (14:32)
Yeah, so Open Evidence as we've seen with a lot of, think these really stand out AI companies started pre kind of pre LLMs. So 2017, they were working on basically machine learning that would allow doctors to be able to type in, you know, the essence of a patient's symptoms, what's presenting and then get some kind of at least a initial stab at a treatment plan or diagnosis.
by looking through the medical literature, which is, you there's a 1.5 million medical papers published every year. The total pan in the literature doubles every five years. So it's a ton of information. They were working on this search engine chat bot for doctors for years and LLMs, you know, just sort of accelerated the interest in it and, you know, awareness of what they were doing. And so, you know, a doctor can go in there say,
what antibiotic is best for a patient with this kind of pneumonia, they have cerebral palsy, right? And it'll put together an answer for them. this is, what was interesting was for them, they really grew through this word of mouth. You had exclusive partnerships that they formed with the New England Journal of Medicine and some other really elite medical journals, which didn't allow any other.
apps to train on their data. And that was in large part because the people that ran those journals, practicing doctors were using Open Evidence at work and wanted to make sure that Open Evidence had the access to the best information at the ready as it was being increasingly used by doctors. So it's really, it has been a sort of bottom-up product-led growth success thus far.
Yeah, replacing, you know, a bunch of these companies that doctors use. one of them is called up to date. you know, they, charge hospitals $500 a seat for this kind of like encyclopedia of, ⁓ information from the medical literature that they would use normally put together diagnoses and Open Evidence is free. So, you know, a huge difference. They just monetize through advertising, which is if you know about, ⁓ sort of advertising pricing.
These are very high intent positions who are extremely valuable, which is why revenue growth has been kind of so rapid. hit 50 in the summer this year and then they hit 150 just very recently. So yeah.
Slava Rubin (16:57)
So what I'm hearing is a AI, let's call it, chat GBT or cloud or Gemini, but specifically focused for doctors. And why is it that Open Evidence is able to create a moat versus just having these other major LLMs be able to just do copy paste the same thing? Is the simple answer, they have exclusive partnerships with these journals?
Jan-Erik Asplund (17:24)
I think that's a big part of it. think, you know, there's a reality that OpenAI, for example, at one of their dev days from earlier this year, they talked about going into medical and healthcare more as something that they wanted to do. And I think on the research side, that's had more traction. I think that with the clinical, like day-to-day decision-making of doctors, the trust level with TrachiPT isn't there. It's not there with Claude.
And so something like Open Evidence has been sort of architected around their needs, which means like every single question that you put in comes out with not just the summarized synthesized answer, but kind of like the thinking chain plus the citations that take you to the actual literature that made it make that decision, which, you know, with Chai GPT today is something that all of that stuff is obscured a lot of the time.
So it's a product that's built for doctors. Another part of it is, of course, this kind of exclusive access. If CHI GPT or Claude's not going to be able to use the New England Journal of Medicine, then it loses a huge degree of usefulness versus something like Open Evidence.
Slava Rubin (18:35)
So I'm really excited about Open Evidence personally. I think it's an incredible use case, but I'm gonna be cynical here for a couple of minutes. one, can't these other LLMs just read all these journals on their own? Or are you saying because of the exclusive content partnership, they're not even allowed to?
Jan-Erik Asplund (18:53)
Correct. Yeah, they can't use New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA. I think it's, not sure how it's pronounced, but it's one of the other sort of major networks of journals that exists. So yeah, they don't have access to any of that stuff.
Slava Rubin (19:07)
So that puts a massive, massive, massive amount of power in these content partnerships. If I'm the New England Journal Medicine or JAMA, and I'm hearing that Open Evidence is now worth $12 billion, don't I want a huge chunk of that value coming back to me somehow because it's my content?
Jan-Erik Asplund (19:27)
say potentially there's a world where they do sort of take a stake in Open Evidence. know what I sort of heard about those initial conversations was that you had a lot of AI healthcare companies that were offering New England Journal of Medicine and others huge deals to train exclusively on their data and they refuse, being like sort of nonprofits dedicated to medical excellence, they
refuse those deals. I'm not sure if that would happen, but that definitely could be a possibility. And one factor that might help Open Evidence because they're probably more likely to do a deal with these journals on that kind of thing versus an open AI, which might not be.
Slava Rubin (20:04)
Got it. And then the whole chain of thinking, know, messing up with a hallucination on my vacation itinerary is one thing, messing up with a hallucination on diagnosis sounds like a really bad thing. So I understand about the think chain and sharing that, which sounds great, but isn't that really like a feature that Gemini or others can share if they wanted?
Jan-Erik Asplund (20:26)
Yeah, definitely. And I think it is not a problem that's necessarily solved by Open Evidence either, which is why if you look at user reports on Reddit and places like that where doctors talk about it, there's definitely still a step where there's the double checking. If something is even vaguely, if you're vaguely questioning or skeptical of the result, there's still a double checking process that happens.
which is still much faster than consulting a, know, encyclopedia of information to do a diagnosis, but it is still a problem for now. And I think as long as we have language models probably will continue to be.
Slava Rubin (21:08)
So they're in talks now to raise a 12 billion, not 6 billion, which they just raised that a couple months ago, right? I mean, it's pretty crazy. And for most people, they've never even heard of Open Evidence, right? So five years from now in 2030, is this the sort of thing where we're going to look back and be like, oh yeah, I remember that AI hype. There was even that company Open Evidence that went from zero to, you know, 12, 25 billion. And then we figured out that it wasn't necessary and it got crushed.
Or do you think they're going to be some monster company?
Jan-Erik Asplund (21:37)
I actually do think it's possible that this will be a monster company. I think, cause I look at it and I see sort of a, you know, Google esc company, you know, 90 % gross margins, cause it's just a search. It's just a chat bot and they're printing money, you know, serving up these incredibly valuable ads, obviously growing very fast. And I do think, you know, they raised, they were at a 40 X multiple before now with this potential
12 billion all around, which seems likely to happen. It's about 80X. So it is very expensive. But they're also doing kind of a Google-esque kind of move and expanding already into other workflows. So one of the most popular categories of AI healthcare product has been AI scribes. And there's several multi-billion dollar companies in this space, really big ones that are transcribing.
doctor conversations with patients and turning those into action items, putting it into the system to be logged and used for billing. And OpenEvidence has already launched a product here. They've already launched a dialer product for healthcare physician communication. And so they're really expanding quite rapidly out of pure sort of search and chat and looking to build this kind of like
operating system for clinicians owning kind of every layer of this. And I think the ADX valuation is kind of betting on this idea that they succeed there and also are able to move up market into enterprise where, know, once you start selling into hospitals, then you're talking about very long deals, but also very, very lucrative deals. So I think
Yeah, a lot of it is a very futureable case, but I think there's a world where in a few years, they 10X, they're doing a billion and a half in revenue and much bigger than they are today.
Slava Rubin (23:26)
So for RAMP, you gave me your base case, $50 billion valuation, bull case, $150 billion valuation. What's your base symbol on Open Evidence?
Jan-Erik Asplund (23:35)
Yeah, I think for base for base I might say like maybe a billion. Well, maybe like 750 million.
Slava Rubin (23:46)
And
what is that valuation?
Jan-Erik Asplund (23:47)
Let me see, 750, let's say.
At 40x, it would be like 30 billion. Maybe if we say it's more like a 30x, then it's 22, 23 billion value.
Slava Rubin (24:01)
Okay, and what's your book is?
Jan-Erik Asplund (24:03)
Bullcase, would think.
I would say healthcare is probably still going to be slower than SaaS or AI native startups because of the upmarket, the enterprise slog of those kinds of sales. So I would say maybe like a billion and a half.
Slava Rubin (24:18)
and what's the valuation there?
Jan-Erik Asplund (24:20)
Uh, yeah, let's say, let's say like maybe 25 X, uh, you know, 38 billion, 40 billion valuation.
Slava Rubin (24:29)
We'll round it off with 40. Okay, great. Yeah, I'm pretty bullish here. I think health tech is a massive industry. Health is a massive industry. One every $5 spent in the United States is actually on health. And I think AI is just waiting to disrupt that significantly. I don't know if Open Evidence is the play, but I do like vertical AI. And I think people are gonna be surprised when this becomes a monster company. Next one.
Apptronik changing gears completely. So we've heard of Elon Musk bringing forward Optimus as a robot from Tesla. There's all kinds of other robot companies. This is the Google humanoid ⁓ bet. So, Jan-Erik give us some background.
Jan-Erik Asplund (25:09)
Yeah, from the people trying to cure humans to the people replacing them with robots. There you go. Apptronik, exactly. If you know Figure AI, the $40 billion robotics company, I think of Apptronik as kind of being the anti-Figure, where Figure is very hot and very sort of hyped up. have a lot of great launch videos, demo videos. Very expensive. It's extraordinarily expensive.
Slava Rubin (25:33)
And very
Jan-Erik Asplund (25:38)
a revenue multiple that might be, you know, sort of scientific notation is required to show it on screen. Apptronik has been sort of the reverse of that. They were founded quite a while ago. I believe it was back over a decade ago, about 2016. It is a spin out from the University of Texas, Austin. They did a lot of work early on with
NASA, they're actually their initial business was selling actuators, which is a key component of, of robots and humanoid robots. And, ⁓ they sort of evolved over the last five years or so into actually building their own humanoid, humanoid robots, which, you know, the sort of, the sort of, ⁓ thesis or vision, ⁓ there is essentially that one day humanoid robots will sort of take over or a lot of the
industrial, commercial, warehouse, defense related tasks for which humans today are necessary. And yeah, one of the things that really stands out is, know, Apptronik being Google's exclusive humanoid robotics partner for Gemini Robotics, which if you, you know, if you know Google, you know, obviously they invented the transformer architecture.
They've done a lot of really foundational work in physical robotics and AI as well. And so ⁓ it's definitely a sort of great partnership. And I think Positions, Apptronik, very neck and neck with a lot of these companies that might be more hyped, like Figure, Orion, Tesla, Optimus for the future, which if they succeed will involve a lot of robots and factories.
Slava Rubin (27:15)
So figure, like you mentioned, 39, 40 billion, you know, massive valuation Then you have Optimus, Tesla, you know, embedded in a massive valuation again. Why is Apptronik not a quote unquote massive valuation? Or are we splitting hairs? You know, it's 1.5 going up to 5 billion potentially right away, or it's already at 5 billion. Is it at a massive valuation and we're just like,
not appreciating how ridiculous some of the other evaluations are.
Jan-Erik Asplund (27:44)
I mean, it depends on how you feel about, you know, valuations with zero in revenue, which is effectively what all these companies are at, given the fact that there's very, very few pilots, you know, even ongoing. I mean, there are much promoted and scattered pilots going on with various companies. I think Apptronik, I mean, my interpretation is that they are staying away from this sort of
potential spiral raising too much money at too high of evaluation and then not being able to deliver on the timeline sort of necessary to justify that. The timelines in humanoid robotics in general, think are quite hard to predict because the CEOs of these companies might tell you that we'll have millions of robots in factories by 2030. Probably a lot of people would say that that's
is a complete fantasy. It's gonna take longer. It will happen, but it'll take longer. So I think, yeah, five billion is a reflection of the team, sort of technology they've built, the potential of the market to be massive and not so much related to fundamentals of revenue or free cashflow, but definitely a slightly more conservative
figure it may be remembering the lessons of 2020, 2021, know, and SoftBank and where raising the most capital doesn't always ensure success even in like capital constraint hardware type spaces. So yeah, just my thoughts.
Slava Rubin (29:13)
So do we think there needs to be only one winner or a Coke and Pepsi situation? Or can this be the car industry where there's going to be many players? So potentially, know, figure Tesla and Apptronik all become what's called successful companies. And obviously there's going to be other competition from, you know, China and other countries and other robots.
Jan-Erik Asplund (29:36)
I definitely think there can be multiple winners. I'm not sure that it's a situation where there's overwhelming of like economies of scale in the, especially in the physical manufacturing side. And I also think that there's sort of, it's a problem where there's a lot of different dimensions between different kinds of commercial environments.
different kinds of, you know, have warehouses where like, for example, the tasks are like picking up boxes and moving them. You need mobility. Then there's industrial, like auto manufacturing has been a has been a big space here. So that requires a lot of precision work. I think there's a lot of different form factors for the robots. There's robots on wheels, robots on pedestals, on legs. There's a lot of variation that I feel like there's,
not much for me to look at and say that only one of these companies can win just because it seems to be such a wide variety of use cases. know, defense is a big one. So yeah, I would be surprised if that were the case.
Slava Rubin (30:40)
So very binary, if my private option, my public option is to invest in Tesla. If my private option is to invest in Apptronik or invest in Figure, I can invest in Apptronik at five billion or Figure at 40 billion. Why invest in Figure? Give me one reason for that. And then why invest in Apptronik? Give me one reason for that.
Jan-Erik Asplund (30:58)
For figure, know, your argument is that they have the largest war chest and this will be a very expensive kind of space to be number one in. And your argument would be that you need to be number one in terms of access to capital and potentially access to talent, you know, via sort of being more well known. If you want to win, I think with Apptronik, the argument is you want to have some kind of
exposure to the upside of humanoid robotics and you want it at the cheapest sort of possible price where it's also kind of more plausible that they'll succeed. And given the sort of Google partnership, have some institutional, some institutional approval or vetting of the idea. I think in that case, you would be more inclined to go for Apptronik.
Slava Rubin (31:44)
What's your prediction for 2030? What's your base in bull case here today worth $5 billion?
Jan-Erik Asplund (31:50)
I'm not sure.
Slava Rubin (31:52)
You obviously can't use a revenue.
Jan-Erik Asplund (31:54)
Well, mean, let's say that we were starting to see robots getting deployed, let's say across automotive and logistics.
You know, and we start seeing actual robots coming out. I would say that like Apptronik, I could see them at the sort of figure evaluation levels in the sort of bull case, most likely. And then probably more like doubling or tripling from here to like a 10, 15 billion in more of the base case, just assuming there's continued progress and deployments and...
that the general interest in the space is still there.
Slava Rubin (32:38)
Got it, so your base case, you did get into five billion, you might get to 20 billion on a base case, is your opinion.
Jan-Erik Asplund (32:44)
Yeah,
yeah, I think so. Cool.
Slava Rubin (32:46)
⁓ yeah, I'm actually a fan of Apptronik. I think that, you know, humanoid robots are here to come for sure. Like, I don't think so fad. I do think we're not getting it tomorrow, but I think by 2030, if you can afford a hundred thousand dollar car, you're going to be having a robot. and I think that the $40 billion valuation is just so high, in my opinion, for
⁓ figure that I do like the attractiveness of the five billion entry point. I don't really see it being an 8x difference of company, but they do have an incredible CEO and figure. So that is definitely one of the main reasons. Let's move on to the next company.
Whop which probably most people on this call have not heard of or used. What is it?
Jan-Erik Asplund (33:32)
Yeah. It's essentially a Shopify and you mentioned, you know, kind of Gen Z marketplace. It is very Gen Z focused. It is a digital storefront. A lot of what you'll see on there. And it was actually founded by people who made a lot of money ⁓ doing up. So there's like a sneaker reselling.
where you buy valuable sneakers as they drop on the web and then you resell them to others for more money. And they built bots that would help you do so programmatically. And they launched Whop. And a lot of the early usage of Whop was for people to sell these sneaker bots to other people who wanted to make money. And it has sort of grown from there into a lot of other sort of ⁓ a gray market.
gray market skews like sports betting communities, trading communities, crypto especially has been a big one. And then also content creators on TikTok, YouTube who wanna pay other people to turn their content into clips and then share it for more eyeballs on social media. And so those people can get paid through Whop for doing that based on the number of views that they generate.
So, you and then there's other kinds of businesses, but those kind of represent a large portion of what's on there right now. And essentially it's stuff that is sort of outside of the mainstream. So you actually will have trouble, you know, kind of building one of these kinds of businesses if you go onto a Shopify or even a lot of these traditional creator economy platforms that are out there.
And then they also have a payments layer. So they recently migrated off Stripe because they were having issues with creators getting their accounts shut down. So, you know, PayPal, Stripe might, you know, not want to support a lot of businesses like this, but, know, they sort of have a way now on Whop to build a business, engage with their community or their customers, and also get paid through there. So very much ⁓ sort of Shopify-esque.
Slava Rubin (35:36)
Yeah, so I just want to make sure we're understanding here because, you know, I'm a bit older, so this is a novel concept. So I always like to be curious. So Shopify obviously is this massive platform that allows anybody to create a storefront to sell real stuff. And when I say real stuff, I mean like an actual surfboard, actual glasses, an actual shirt where you physically has to then be sent to you. And, you know, the UPS or FedEx, you know, puts it in front of your house. Here,
And there's all kinds of digital marketplace as well where you can learn courses or you can get taught something. Here, this is these digital products that are somewhat niche community, niche communities, or a bit shady even. And Whop has figured out how to become the marketplace for that.
What I would compare this to, this is not exactly that, but if people are having a hard time grokking why anybody would pay for these things, I think it's similar to, it used to be that, I want a toy, buy me this toy for $50. And then starting 15 years ago, young people were like, I'm playing a video game, buy me this skin for this avatar or for this player, or I want to buy this sword, which is a digital sword that I had to pay $50 for.
for that sword and the parent was like, are you talking about? You're paying $50 for a sword. And then the child was like, I need this sword to go into next level, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I consider this the same thing, which is really, these are like digital products, digitally native products that most people here probably don't interact with very often. But the young people are creating a community of wanting to get access to these things and there's not a centralized place for these sellers and Whop has become that. Is that fair?
Jan-Erik Asplund (37:26)
Perfect explanation. Yeah. So I think one of the big factors is that Whop makes it incredibly easy, much like Shopify did, to build this kind of business because it contains everything that you need. there's kind of like the storefront where you have a bunch of SKUs. You can purchase access to a Discord community or purchase access to courses, videos, ongoing communication and forum discussions, that kind of thing. You can do everything to sort of run your business.
on Whop, there's even like live streaming for people who have coming from live streaming communities on Twitch and other places. there's a lot of, it's a very strong all-in-one value prop for these kinds of hustlers who are making money here. And then I think the other thing is sort of zooming out a little bit like you did, this is really a sort of Gen Z phenomenon that is, or Whop is kind of the,
embodiment of this much larger phenomenon, which is Gen Z is obsessed with sports betting. you look at Cal-She and Polymarket, know, blowing up with betting on sports, day trading, you know, with Robinhood, crypto via, you know, exchanges, but also like meme coins and Pump.Fun, trading cards, you know, you have Whatnot, which is a company maybe we'll cover in the future. But all these kinds of, ⁓ you know,
very dopamine driven, short-term kind of money-making opportunities are all the kinds of things that are being productized on Whop into a trading circle. So I'll tell you what sports lines to bet on, or I'll give you good ideas for day trading. I'll teach you how to flip cards, resell cards to other people, show you how to make viral clips. It's really as pure distillation of that sort of gen Z.
interests in these kinds of financial products and financial entertainment products turned into a storefront.
Slava Rubin (39:08)
So does this become a hundred billion dollar business like Shopify?
Jan-Erik Asplund (39:11)
Good question. I think they were the least optimistic one in the poll we did. I think one person said they were super bullish. I think if it remains sort of as gray market as it is, I think that's problematic because I think we're still sort of yet to see what the retention looks like on that. How quickly does this sort of go out of style?
if it does, which I think is very possible. There's a world where it becomes a, I think $2 billion company in the next several years, if it of becomes a much broader Gen Z kind of digital storefront, really a Gen Z Shopify where it's not just kinds of this kind of gray market of digital products, more of a broad, like you said, courses, things like that. I think it's possible.
But I think, yeah, the gray market thing is slightly what's concerning to me.
Slava Rubin (40:09)
Yeah, I agree. I mean, we're talking about an $800 million valuation. So we're not even talking with a B, right? So every company we typically talk about is in the billions. So this is quote unquote, a bit early. So there's definitely more risk. Could this become a zero? I definitely think it could become a zero. Could this become a huge company? It definitely could become a huge company. If you want to play the optimistic narrative, you could just say that just the way Shopify rode the e-commerce boom,
and they were the right company at the right place at the right time with the right products, you could say Whop is riding the prediction markets, the sports gambling, the crypto, the social media, the alpha seeking kind of trends. If all of that continues to become more digitized products that people are gonna wanna try to get access to and not have to deal with shipping, right? Not want to deal with the actual
last mile delivery, then Whop has an opportunity to potentially keep on growing while all those other markets keep growing. That doesn't mean that I'm just running to putting money into this company, but that was the optimistic narrative that could a $5-10 billion company come out of that? I think the answer to that is for sure, yes. Are they the company to be that? And is that going to happen? I'm not sure, but that is my positive narrative.
What is your base case and bull case in 2030 for Whop?
Jan-Erik Asplund (41:34)
Yeah, I think my base case is like maybe I'm going to assume that this trend has momentum and they can hit 500 million, roughly 500 million by then, maybe valued at a four or five billion.
Slava Rubin (41:49)
Got it.
Jan-Erik Asplund (41:50)
I think it's my base case.
Slava Rubin (41:52)
and what your bull case.
Jan-Erik Asplund (41:55)
Bull case, maybe slightly less likely than some of the other bull cases to me, but I would say, know, maybe in the, maybe in the billion 1.5 range again, and maybe put them, yeah, the 10 billion, 15 billion valuation. other thing I wanted to say, it goes along with what you said is that there was a very large sort of,
community that was shorting Shopify and was very bearish on Shopify early on. And Amazon. Yeah, and Amazon. I'm trying to remember who this guy was. He got in trouble for shorting. It'll come to me as soon as we're off this call. Andrew something. But the essence of it was that there was a lot of this kind of scam looking behavior on Shopify via people who were
using their affiliate codes, trying to teach people on YouTube how to do drop shipping on e-commerce, kind of this very low, not really a real business, but just sort of making get rich quick schemes, that kind of thing. And that had a real foothold on Shopify for quite a while, but it didn't preclude a real business being built and also real businesses being built on top of Shopify.
So that's definitely possible, you know, that that happens. I think I would just have to see more evidence that those kind of more traditional digital commerce businesses or less gray market ones are maybe being built on Whop just to give it some more diversity.
Slava Rubin (43:27)
I completely agree. Next company, our final company, the world of defense tech. So Shield AI,
Jan-Erik Asplund (43:32)
Shield AI, yeah. So everyone knows, know, Anduril, one of the biggest kind of private companies and especially the biggest name in defense. So where Anduril is kind of building this replacement for Lockheed Martin or Raytheon doing everything from drones to anti-drones, ground vehicles, sea vehicles, software. Shield AI has really focused 100 % from the beginning on
on building drones and building the software for drones. And specifically drones that can operate in places where GPS access is not reliable or can be jammed, which, if you look at Ukraine, Russia, that's kind of the daily reality there is that drones are the number one weapon, but they can sort of die very easily when they're jammed. And Shield AI is also not looking to replace the primes or become the next Lockheed Martin necessarily. They are more...
building software to operate inside everyone's drones. And so they've worked with and partnered with Airbus, Kratos, L3Harris, various other companies in the space, sort of using their software in these companies' building a sort of software-like business at the same time that they are competing on physical drones as well.
Slava Rubin (44:41)
Yeah, mean, not as well known as a company as Android, but it seems to be doing incredible work, has really strong revenue traction. Valuation seems very fair at 20x. Having done around $250 million of revenue in 24 and valued at just 20x that, with a $5 billion valuation, I mean, that's quite fair. I mean, if you believe that drones are our future, Shield AI is an excellent way to play it. There are some other ways to play it, but this is...
definitely a pretty decent value opportunity. mean, personally, I'm quite bullish on drones and defense tech for drones and even dual use for drones. think the software needed is only gonna continue to be stronger and more important versus the actual hardware product itself. So I think Shield AI is a really interesting opportunity.
It'd be different for me if it was coming in at a 50 or 80 X valuation, which the Andurils of the world are going to be a much higher valuations, but they also have much bigger visions. So I mean, I think this is an exciting opportunity. Any what's your base case on Shield AI?
Jan-Erik Asplund (45:48)
Yeah, think base case would probably be probably roughly in the 1.5 billion range, which would come out to like a 30 billion dollar valuation. Then a bull case might be more like, you
three billion range let's say maybe like 50-60 billion.
Slava Rubin (46:18)
Nice, so there's a lot of opportunity for you in Shield AI. All right, well, now that we've gone through the five, I'm just gonna ask for one quick vote again. So based on what you just heard, if we could just put up the poll, what are the two companies, just the two, what are the two companies you're most interested in investing in? If you had $100, $1,000, or $1 that you could invest right now, we gave it to you available to invest in all five of these companies, which two would you pick?
based on the valuation and 20, 30 exit. So we'll give everybody 30 seconds.
All right, what are the results? And then I'm gonna ask you, Jan-Erik, to give me your order of your five. And if we could go back to the slide with the five companies on it, so Jan-Erik can see the five names, that'd be great.
So.
Jan-Erik Asplund (47:03)
I that our one Whop person stuck to their guns and ad-
Slava Rubin (47:06)
I love it. Go Whop person. Nice. Apptronik moved up. Shield AI moved up. Very interesting. Ramp moved down. Interesting. So people are thinking it's expensive. Awesome. So today you have $100 or a million dollars or a billion dollars. Jan-Erik, in order, what are your five? From one to five, where do you put that money?
Jan-Erik Asplund (47:27)
I think for me it's Ramp at the top, Open Evidence I think it's Open Evidence second, Shield AI, Apptronik and then Whop, I think is my list.
Slava Rubin (47:35)
Sorry, Shield AI was for for you.
Jan-Erik Asplund (47:37)
Three.
Slava Rubin (47:38)
Say the order again. was Ramp.
Jan-Erik Asplund (47:39)
Yeah, Ramp Open Evidence, Shield, Apptronik and Whop.
Slava Rubin (47:43)
Got it.
Um, yeah, I'm going to go Open Evidence. Number one, I'm going bold. I'm going, yeah, I'm going Shield AI. Number two, I'm going Ramp. Uh, number three, cause it's, uh, expensive for me. Apptronik number four and then Whop I do think that Whop can surprise us significantly. Um, so it's just interesting, even based on your base and bull cases, the
place where you gave the most amount of opportunity was actually a Whop and Shield AI, just so you know, versus the ⁓ current price. All right, we're wrapping up here. Let's go to our disclaimer slide. So nothing in this presentation should be construed as an offer to sell or offer securities or solicitation of an offer to buy securities. All investments involve risk and the possibility of loss, including loss of principal and neither past performance nor forward-looking information is a guarantee of future results.
And then some more disclaimers. The Fundrise Innovation Fund offers exposure to over $200 million of venture opportunities across some of the most exciting industries. Visit Fundrise.com/Vincent to learn more about the Innovation Fund's portfolio companies and flexible investment minimums. Investing in shares is speculative and involves substantial risk. You should purchase shares of this closed-end tender offer only if you can afford a complete loss of your investment. The Fund's portfolio is a concentrated in technology-related securities, which can carry greater risk than more than
than a more diversified portfolio. Technology companies are subject to risks like rapid innovation cycles, product obsolescence, and intense competition. Investors should consider the investment objectives, risks and charges, and expenses for the fund carefully before investing. Information regarding this considerations and prospectus can be obtained at Fundrise.com/Innovation. Investors should read this prospectus carefully before investing. Awesome. With that all said, thank you everybody for joining. Have happy holidays.
and we will talk about more pre-IPO companies in 2026, which might be the year of the IPO. All right, see you.
Jan-Erik Asplund (49:45)
Exactly. Thanks. Bye.
