Solari Capital Exits Stealth With $350 Million Deployed and an IPO Timetable Grievance

Solari Capital, the venture firm run by AJ Scaramucci, emerged from stealth on Thursday with $350 million already deployed since its founding across early-stage deals, late-stage growth, and companies it incubates in-house.

Scaramucci, the son of SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci, has assembled a heavyweight backer list: 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.

The firm's core thesis is what Scaramucci calls "programmable reality" — the argument that compounding computing power will make biology, intelligence, physical matter, and money engineerable the way software is. The portfolio serves as a show-and-tell for the idea: xAI (now inside SpaceX), Suno, Tessera Therapeutics, Varda Space, and Northwood Space.

But the sharper edge of the pitch concerns the public markets. Scaramucci told Fortune business editor Nick Lichtenberg that companies used to reach an IPO in about four years, and now the wait runs 12 to 15 years. Early value-creation, he argues, stays locked inside venture and growth-equity portfolios rather than reaching public investors.

The data supports him. University of Florida professor Jay Ritter, known as "Mr. IPO," says the median VC-backed tech company was six to nine years old when it went public for most of the 1990s. The median dropped to four in 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble. In 2024, the median age hit 13.5 years; last year it stood at 12.

The pipeline has thinned as well. Ritter's figures show 34 tech listings in 2025, versus 205 in 1995. The companies that do list arrive far larger: last year's median VC-backed tech IPO carried roughly $132 million in trailing revenue, compared with about $40 million in 1995, both adjusted for inflation. Most of the compounding now happens before public investors can buy in.

Solari's portfolio reflects a deliberate push to shorten that wait. 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. Radial Health, Solari's flagship incubation, already appears on the Nasdaq Private Market as a pre-IPO name.

There is a personal thread here too. Scaramucci's collectibles company paid $2 million for a first-appearance Iron Man comic and bought a record-setting Pokémon card. He frames both ventures — collectibles and private tech shares — as a way to give ordinary investors exposure to asset classes that art, dinosaur bones, trading cards, and pre-IPO equity have long reserved for the wealthy.

Anyone working in venture right now knows the liquidity math: investors wait years longer to get their money back than they did a generation ago. Tokenized private shares and marquee collectibles are two different routes to the same destination — broader access to assets the wealthy already own. How easily those assets can be priced and sold, or what the going rate for dinosaur-bone shares might be, remains the open question hanging over Solari's experiment.