To get a slice of hot artificial intelligence startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, investors have been flocking to investment vehicles that pool money from several parties to back just one company. These structures, known as special purpose vehicles, have long been part of Silicon Valley business but have quietly mushroomed as demand for AI startup stakes has skyrocketed.
When Thrive Capital earlier this year led a purchase of existing OpenAI shares, estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, it also created an SPV of less than $10 million to give its limited partners extra exposure to the ChatGPT developer, according to a person briefed on the investment. Around the same time, at least two smaller VC firms, Soul Ventures and SparkLabs Global Ventures, used SPVs to buy shares of OpenAI in the sale that valued the company at $86 billion, in Soul’s case to make it easier to buy more shares of the company in the future. Additionally, several investment firms assembled SPVs to buy Anthropic shares owned by bankrupt crypto exchange FTX last month.