AJ Scaramucci's Solari Capital Exits Stealth With $350 Million Deployed

AJ Scaramucci's venture firm Solari Capital emerged from stealth on Thursday with $350 million already deployed — and a thesis that private markets are locking ordinary investors out of value creation for far too long.

The son of SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci has spread the capital across early-stage deals, late-stage growth investments and companies incubated in-house since the firm's founding. His backer list reads like a venture capital hall of fame: SV Angel founder Ron Conway, Breyer Capital's Jim Breyer, Bain Capital co-chairman Stephen Pagliuca, former Alphabet chief executive Eric Schmidt, and entrepreneur and author Peter Diamandis.

Solari's portfolio includes xAI (now inside SpaceX), Suno, Tessera Therapeutics, Varda Space and Northwood Space. Scaramucci calls his central idea "programmable reality" — the argument that compounding computing power will make biology, intelligence, physical matter and money engineerable the way software already is.

But the sharper edge of his pitch is narrower. In an interview with Fortune business editor Nick Lichtenberg published Wednesday, Scaramucci pointed to a structural shift in how long companies wait before going public. Companies used to reach an IPO in about four years, he said. Now it takes 12 to 15.

The numbers back him up

University of Florida professor Jay Ritter, the researcher known as "Mr. IPO," has tracked the phenomenon for decades. For most of the 1990s, the median VC-backed tech company was six to nine years old at its public debut, according to Ritter's data. The median dropped to four years in 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble. In 2024, the median age hit 13.5 years. Last year it was 12.

The pipeline has thinned as well as aged. Ritter's data shows just 34 tech listings in 2025, against 205 in 1995. The companies that do go public are far bigger when they arrive: last year's median VC-backed tech IPO carried roughly $132 million in trailing revenue, versus about $40 million in 1995, adjusted for inflation. In plain terms, enormous value creation now happens inside venture and growth-equity portfolios — before public investors ever get a chance to buy in.

Scaramucci frames this as an access problem, and he extends the same logic beyond startups. His collectibles company paid $2 million for a first-appearance Iron Man comic and bought a record-setting Pokémon card. His stated goal is to give ordinary investors a shot at markets they have been locked out of — art, dinosaur bones, trading cards and other expensive collectibles. Tokenized private shares and trophy collectibles are, in his telling, two routes to the same end: letting more people own the assets the wealthy already hold.

The portfolio as proof of concept

Looked at through that lens, Solari's holdings form a coherent bet on shortening the wait for liquidity. Fission Labs tokenizes shares of private companies so they can trade on a secondary market. Architect Financial is a derivatives exchange built for the AI economy. Solari's flagship incubation, Radial Health, already appears on the Nasdaq Private Market as a pre-IPO name.

The timing suits the moment. Anyone working in venture right now knows that limited partners and founders are waiting years longer than they once did to see returns. Secondary markets for private shares have grown to fill the gap, and tokenization pushes the idea further by breaking private stakes into tradable units — at least in theory.

The open questions

The model still has to prove it works in practice. Pricing and selling tokenized private shares remains difficult, and there is no established going rate for dinosaur-bone shares. Fortune's Amanda Gerut, who reviewed the interview notes, flagged exactly this gap: it is not yet clear how easily these assets can be valued or exited, even if the access argument is compelling.

What is clear is that Solari is not a typical stealth-stage debut. It arrives with $350 million committed, billionaire backers and a portfolio that already spans rocket infrastructure, AI music, gene writing and tokenized equity rails. If Scaramucci is right that computing power will make physical and financial assets as engineerable as software, the firm's blended play — venture returns plus collectibles exposure for retail investors — could redefine who gets to participate in early value creation. If he is wrong, the market will get its answer in how those tokenized shares and pre-IPO stakes actually trade.