Remy Blaire: Welcome to FINTECH.TV. For years, the biggest moneymaking deals in tech went only to wealthy insiders, while regular investors were left waiting on the outside. But that is finally changing. A powerful new crop of multibillion-dollar tech leaders is growing fast behind the scenes, building the real plumbing, security, and payment tools for global business. And now a unique fund listed on the NYSE lets everyday investors own a slice of these private giants, right from a regular brokerage account, before they ever go public. Joining us here at the New York Stock Exchange to talk about opening the doors of private tech to everyone is Dr. Najam Kidwai, CEO and co-founder of C1 Fund. It’s great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me. We’re here at the New York Stock Exchange, and we’re talking about these private tech companies about to go public. Give us a sense of where they are right now and what we can expect moving forward.
Najam Kidwai: In the last couple of years, we’ve had Circle, we’ve had eToro, we’ve had a number of companies go public. Now we’re seeing companies like Ripple and Kraken and Polymarket gearing up for public listings, hopefully in the next year or two. So it’s a super exciting time. We run a closed-end fund, which is listed on the NYSE here. That gives everyday investors anywhere in the world exposure to these companies before they actually go public. Pre-IPO, we buy these companies on the secondary market. So you get the upside of pre-IPO private companies with the safeguard, liquidity, and regulation of a publicly listed vehicle.
Remy Blaire: Yes. And you mentioned a few key words there, including those names. These companies are private for longer, but indeed they have become household names. Give us a sense of what we can expect in terms of liquidity as we move forward into the new year.
Najam Kidwai: If you take Ripple as an example, in 2019, Ripple was valued at 10 billion. In April of this year, it was valued at $50 billion. A lot of that upside has been created while the company has been private. What you’re going to see is that whenever they go public, and hopefully at a substantially larger valuation, that’s when public investors would buy that stock. But today, through C1 Fund, you’d be able to get exposure to a basket of the leading digital asset companies. Most of the companies in our portfolio are unicorns. [unclear: “Several are coins”]. When we are making those investments from our fund, we see that within one to three years they are likely to have a liquidity event, be it an M&A or an IPO. So investors are getting in at a point where substantial value creation can still occur while these companies are privately held, sometimes three or four x before they go public.
Remy Blaire: And for your fund, listed here on the New York Stock Exchange, for viewers who may not be as familiar in terms of exposure, how does it actually work?
Najam Kidwai: It’s a closed-end fund structure. Sitting anywhere in the world, you can get a brokerage account, you can see the ticker [unclear: “CFD”], and that gives you exposure to 11 of the leading companies in the digital asset space. Ten of those companies are currently private. One company is public, which is BitGo. Think of it as an ETF, but giving you exposure to private tech, specifically in the digital asset space. Our companies are all over the world. They’re all profitable. We are on the cap table of all these companies, by the way, as well. So these are not sitting in SPVs or different vehicles, and we have good visibility on what the management is doing. All of these companies have very strong business models, strong profitability, and are actually looking to go public to legitimize their business and to make sure that investors can get access to these companies sitting anywhere in the world.
Remy Blaire: And not many people may know about the importance of infrastructure when it comes to artificial intelligence. But I understand that when it comes to digital assets and the space, you’re focused on the plumbing. Can you walk us through why this is so important?
Najam Kidwai: I think crypto was really driven by Bitcoin. It was driven by the meme mania around tokens. A lot of people were looking at the 10x, 100x. People weren’t really worried about or looking at the infrastructure of these companies, the people who were building banks, wallets, custodians, exchanges, compliance. If you’re going to have institutional adoption, if you’re going to have the BlackRocks and the JPMorgans of the world investing in this space, they want to be investing in things that are real, with real infrastructure, that they can actually utilize, that can be referenced, that can be scaled. So for us, we’re investing in really the picks and shovels that allow all businesses that are listed on the New York Stock Exchange to hopefully be able to do their business faster. Blockchain is now here to stay. I think everybody recognizes that Bitcoin is at nearly a $3 trillion asset class. It’s only going to get bigger. My view is that within probably the next decade, it will surpass gold. Blockchain, the ledger, the ability to track everything, the digitization of finance, tokenization, real-world assets, fractional ownership. When we think about assets today, we never used to think that you could buy real estate and you could have 100 people owning that same piece of real estate, art, cars. So this fractional ownership, the securitization of assets, we saw Securitize go public earlier this year as the first tokenization platform, which is doing really well on the stock market. This is really still very nascent, still very early. I’ve been involved for 30 years now in this digital space, and it’s very much like 1997 was to the internet. Fast forward 30 years, and we can’t live without the internet, without Wi-Fi, without Bluetooth. They’ve all become very much utility. I see the same thing happening in digital assets. A lot of the oxygen has been sucked up by AI in the last 12 to 18 months from an investment perspective. But really, the next generation of AI will also need agents that will need payment. They will need compliance. So a lot of the companies in the digital asset space will be able to provide that infrastructure for the AI agentic economy and the AI physical economy as well.
Remy Blaire: As you mentioned, a lot of key points there. At the end of the day, we’re talking about potential wealth for everyday investors. How much of a game changer is it to get access to these pre-IPO companies?
Najam Kidwai: It’s a great question. I was very fortunate to be an early investor in a company that ultimately became Forge Global, which is a pre-IPO marketplace now recently acquired by Schwab. You’ve had EquityZen being acquired by Morgan Stanley. So there’s legitimacy in this space, and for a lot of people the question is, how do I get exposure to these companies? If you’re not a venture capitalist, if you’re not a high-net-worth individual, how would you be able to get that access? How we make that possible for the everyday person is we take the best of both models: the power of a publicly listed vehicle, which comes with audits, compliance, regulation, and most importantly, daily liquidity, but then giving those investors access to these companies without the high-net-worth accreditation requirement, no minimums, daily liquidity. That becomes really important. I actually feel that in the stock markets of the future, you’re going to see a lot more of these types of vehicles. There are vehicles like Destiny, Robinhood, there’s C1 Fund. We’re also looking at doing a listing between Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi for AI and quantum as well. We’re seeing that investors have a very strong demand for access to private companies. Late-stage pre-IPO is the right category right now because they’re de-risked. Our companies typically tend to be serious and above, regulated, licensed, no tokens, no cryptocurrencies, infrastructure, and are likely to have a liquidity event. So for investors, they’re de-risked. We do all of the hard work. We’ve done the due diligence, we’ve done the analysis, we’ve sourced the stock, and we’ve now put it in a publicly listed vehicle, because a lot of times investors will say, I don’t know where to start. Everybody’s heard of Bitcoin, everybody’s heard of Ethereum, but then it’s, what’s the eBay of this space? What’s the Amazon of this space? What’s the Booking.com of this space? They don’t know where to start. So I think platforms like C1 give you very safe access, where all of the homework has been done, with all the leading names. Companies like Polymarket three years ago didn’t exist. Today it has investment from ICE, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, right? [unclear: “Donald Trump Jr’s platform”] just put 300 million in. It’s a $21 billion business. What does it look like in the next three to five years? We think more likely it will be public. It will have institutional and retail investors. So our job is to find companies like Polymarket, Ripple, and Kraken and turn them into household names before they actually go public.
Remy Blaire: A lot to keep our eyes on as we head into [unclear: “your end as well as 2027”]. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for sharing all of your insights.
Najam Kidwai: Fantastic. Great to see you on the show. Thank you.
