Private AI Deals Aren’t Just For the 1%
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Michael’s note: By the time most investors can buy into groundbreaking companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, or Anthropic, the biggest gains are already in the rearview mirror.
We all know there’s an entire phase that happens before that, while a company is still private, that most individual investors can’t ever hope to get involved in. Historically, that door has been open only to venture capitalists and Silicon Valley insiders.
But that’s the world Luke Lango works in.
Luke is a senior technology analyst at our sister company, InvestorPlace. He’s seen firsthand the wealth-making power of a successful private company before it IPOs. And until now, ordinary investors had no way of accessing these deals.
Today though, Luke’s found a way to open the door. That’s why I sat down with him this week to have him explain why he the conditions for taking part are unusually strong right now, and – just as important – what the real risks are.
Read on below and be sure to tune in to his upcoming free, online webinar, The 2026 AI Megadeal Event. There, Luke will share the details and name of one private AI company currently raising funds, just for attending.
Michael Salvatore: Luke, thank you for joining me today.
Luke Lango: Thanks for having me.
Michael: You’ve spent your career in and around Silicon Valley. In that time, you must’ve seen plenty of private startups rise and fall.
So when you look at an early-stage private company, what do you see that ordinary investors on the outside can’t?
Luke: The key difference is that for most of a private company’s life, people only see the headlines. They only know the facts once it’s already been packaged for the public market – the SEC paperwork, the pitch to Wall Street, and the ticker symbol.
What they don’t see is the two or three years before that, when the company is being built and the real signal is available to anyone sitting in the room.
I’ve spent my career on both sides of that room: building startups myself and sitting across the table from the venture capitalists who decide which of those startups get funded and which quietly die.
That gives me pattern recognition a headline can’t. I’ve watched dozens of pitches, and I know what a founding team sounds like in month six versus what they sound like in month sixty.
The other piece is access. Through my Caltech network and relationships built over a decade covering tech – people inside Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, SpaceX, Tesla, and OpenAI – I can get a read on a company’s technology and trajectory well before it shows up in a press release.
Public investors are reacting to a story that’s already been told. I’m trying to get in while the story is still being written.
Michael: So I know right now you’re set to show people how to get involved in private AI companies. But if that’s going to work, the AI trade needs a lot more runway.
Over the next couple of years, and then looking out five to 10, where do you actually think AI and the broader tech buildout are heading? What makes you confident the trend has real staying power rather than being another cycle that fades?
Luke: Over the next couple of years, I think we’re still early in the buildout phase – the compute, the power, the physical infrastructure underneath this boom is nowhere close to finished.
That’s the part people underestimate because it’s boring compared to the headlines about AI models going rogue with cyberattacks.
But zoom out to five or 10 years, and what I think we’re watching is the economy being rebuilt on a new foundation. It’s the same scale of shift as electricity or the internet. And not everyone will transition smoothly.
We’ve called this the “Technochasm” to our readers – the widening gap between companies that successfully deploy AI and everyone else.
What gives me confidence this isn’t just another hype cycle is that it’s the first time I’ve seen the biggest, most cash-rich companies in the world treat a new technology as existential rather than optional.
That’s not just belief – that’s capital allocation – and capital allocation at that scale doesn’t reverse on a dime.
Michael: But there’s another factor at play. You say that private AI companies are doing something different today than we saw in previous tech booms. Tell me about that.
Luke: Here’s the mechanism that I think matters most right now and that most investors are missing entirely: Big tech is sitting on an enormous pile of cash, and increasingly, they’re choosing to buy their way into AI capability rather than build it from scratch internally.
Building takes years and isn’t guaranteed to work. Buying a team with proven innovations is faster and, at their scale, cheap. That decision is rewriting the exit path for early-stage investors.
Historically, the exit for a startup investor was the IPO – a long, uncertain, multiyear process.
Now, the exit is increasingly an acquisition by a company with a trillion-dollar balance sheet that would rather write a check than wait.
That means capital can come back to early investors faster, and it means the number of realistic exit doors for a promising private company has gone up, not down.
That’s the engine behind why I think this window is unusually strong right now.
Michael: That makes the big players more competitive, too – they get to keep all these breakthroughs to themselves.
But finding that breakthrough tech is key. How do you separate the winners from the losers so early on?
Luke: Every company I evaluate gets run through the same lens: People, Product, Timing – PPT. Product and Timing matter, but People is the one that decides everything else, and it’s not close.
A great team can pivot a mediocre product into a great business. A weak team will find a way to ruin a great product.
So when I’m vetting a founding team, I’m not just looking at résumés. I’m looking for founders who deeply understand the problem they’re solving because they’ve lived it… Who can recruit talent better than they should be able to at their stage… and who tell me the truth about what isn’t working yet.
The team I’d walk away from is the one that only talks about the upside. The team I’d back is the one that can tell me, unprompted, exactly what could kill their company – and already has a plan for it.
That kind of self-awareness is rare, and in my experience, it’s the single-best predictor of which companies survive long enough for Product and Timing to even matter.
Michael: Private companies are, of course, orders of magnitude more risky than public ones. They’re unproven, small, and often years out from making any money.
So why should any serious, risk-aware investor still allocate a slice of their money to something this speculative? How much is sensible?
Luke: I want to be straight with people, because I think this space attracts too much hype and not enough honesty.
Most venture bets fail. Nine out of 10 don’t return your money. If I told you otherwise, I’d be lying to you, and that’s not how I run any of my services.
So the real question isn’t “will every pick work?” – it’s why a serious, risk-aware investor still wants exposure to this asset class at all.
The answer is that venture-style outcomes aren’t symmetrical the way most public market outcomes are. Your downside on any single deal is capped at what you put in, but your upside isn’t capped at all – one winner in a basket of 10 can return the entire basket many times over.
That asymmetry is exactly why this belongs as a small, deliberate slice of a portfolio, not a core holding.
I think about it the way any venture investor does: Size each position so that losing it entirely doesn’t change your life, size the total allocation so that one grand slam can meaningfully move your net worth, and let the math of asymmetric outcomes do the rest of the work over time.
Michael: Well said, Luke. Thank you for your time today.
Luke: My pleasure, Michael.
To building wealth beyond measure,
Michael Salvatore
Editor, TradeSmith Daily
P.S. Luke is putting the full case together – including the specific private deal he’s most excited about right now – at The 2026 AI Megadeal Event on Thursday, July 30 at 1 p.m. ET. It’s free to attend.
When you register, you’ll also have the chance to join Luke’s VIP text list. As a thank-you, he’ll send you his new report: The AI Collectors’ Portfolio: 7 Stocks to Buy for the Biggest Tech Spending Boom of All Time. It’s free – but you need to register for the event first. Reserve your spot here.