Last year, Justin Ernest noticed a massive gap in how venture capital was working: Family offices and smaller institutional investors were eager to invest in the fastest-growing AI companies but couldn’t get access to those cap tables.
Having spent over five years at Playground Global investing in deep tech and helping lead fundraising, Ernest was confident his connections to both investors and founders would allow him to bridge that gap.
Instead of launching a formal VC fund, a process he says takes new managers anywhere from 12 to 18 months, Ernest used his network to secure allocations of stock in high-profile, later-stage companies. He then offers these individual deals to a group of about 30 smaller institutional investors using special purpose vehicles (SPVs), which act as single-deal funds.
Over the last 12 months, his firm, Sabertooth Capital, has invested nearly $500 million into 10 companies, including Anthropic, Anduril, Base Power, Databricks, PsiQuantum, and SpaceX. The firm treats each deal as its own separate fund, in most cases structuring it as an SPV, in which the fund’s investors buy shares in the vehicle that owns the stock.
He’s writing checks ranging from $10 million to $275 million — meaning he’s gaining significant chunks of shares — and always participating in official, company-approved funding rounds.
