As initial public offerings near for SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI, family offices are vying for access to these companies before they go public. Intermediaries have been inundated with requests from family offices to buy private shares of these companies.
“Historically, private deals were closed-door affairs,” says Brad Long, CIO of wealth management firm Wealthspire. “Today, investors of every size believe they are in the flow, and we are seeing considerable indications of interest from clients across the spectrum, from multi-billion-dollar family offices to the millionaire next door.”
SpaceX—the Space Exploration Technologies Corp.—will go public on June 12, while Anthropic PBC and OpenAI Group PBC are expected to be listed in the fall.
Family offices and other private investors are hoping to take part in these companies’ rapid growth. For example, Anthropic, founded in 2021, recently conducted a $65 billion Series H funding round that included co-leads the Capital Group Companies Inc. and GIC Private Ltd., a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund. It is now valued at $965 billion, as of late May, up from $4 billion at its Series B funding round which closed in 2022.
A Cambridge Associates report from late May noted that by the time these companies go public, much of their upside will already have accrued to previously established private investors, heightening the urgency for investors to find a stake as quickly as possible.
How to Gain Access
The validity of access to these companies through special purpose vehicles—which allow secondary market investors to buy shares in the private companies—has been questioned. For example, in a blog post from February that was updated in May, Anthropic warned investors that only the company’s board could approve secondary sales of its shares, putting into question the validity of access offered through numerous SPVs.
“We do not permit SPVs to acquire Anthropic stock, and any transfer of shares to an SPV are void under our transfer restrictions,” Anthropic stated. “Offers investing in Anthropic’s past or future financing rounds through an SPV are prohibited.”
According to data from Pitchbook, the number of secondary SPV transactions through Sydecar, an SPV automation platform, increased by 682% through the end of 2025 from 2023 levels.
“That demand has, in some corners, invited predatory behavior, with promoters offering exposure to these names through structures laden with placement, management and carry fees.” Long says. “Even before [Anthropic’s] announcement, we were cautioning clients against pursuing exposure through these less-tested and more onerous vehicles.”
OpenAI and SpaceX both include language in their terms limiting or prohibiting the sale of their respective shares through SPVs.
“There are a lot of these SPVs that claim to have exposure to these companies. But upon further investigation, these tend to be contracts with insiders to assign proceeds from the eventual sale of those positions, rather than direct transfer of those equity positions to the SPV,” says Kaush Amin, head of private market investing at U.S. Bank.
‘Category-Defining’ Opportunities
Shang Chou, co-founder of multi-family office Dishmi Capital LLC, notes that the real challenge in the SPV and secondaries market is differentiating between attractive opportunities from many unattractive ones.
“The landscape is murky. We’re seeing deals with lots of ‘hair’ on them, as well as third-party middlemen pitching access that they don’t actually have,” Chou says. “In one recent investment we looked at, the lead investor from a prior funding round was selling a portion to boost their [distributed to paid-in capital] and metrics ahead of their own next fundraise.”
Still, the demand for companies’ shares by family offices highlights investors’ appetite for private stakes in companies. According to UBS’s 2026 global family office report, approximately 8% of family office portfolios make direct investments in private companies.
“The level of family office demand for secondary exposure to companies like SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI reflects how private capital is thinking about the future of technology, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, defense and global economic influence,” says Danielle Patterson, executive director of family office at ISS Market Intelligence, which owns CIO. “Many families view these businesses as category-defining platforms with the potential to shape major sectors of the economy for decades.”
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Tags: Family Offices