One of the most popular acronyms in Silicon Valley these days is SPV.
It stands for special purpose vehicle. In tech startup land, it’s a type of investment fund that typically involves concentrating all of its assets in one company. SPVs have blown up in recent years as investors clamor to get a piece of hot startups with valuations often in the tens of billions of dollars.
But buyer beware. Investors are warning of hidden fees, unclear rules about ownership, and marketing that’s driven by FOMO, or the fear of missing out.
Traditional venture capital funds spread risk across a portfolio of startups, with the understanding that most bets will fail and that the one or two successes will pay back the fund several times over. In an SPV, a fund manager usually raises capital for a single deal and recruits a syndicate of smaller investors to join for an added fee that covers management and other costs.
Some established venture firms use the vehicles to offer their limited partners — endowments, pension funds or high-net worth investors — a larger slice of a single startup. That allows the firm to write a bigger check and capture more ownership than would be possible using their existing funds.
“In venture capital, a few winners deliver all the results,” said Sandeep Dahiya, professor of finance at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. “SPVs are a single shot — if it works out, good. If not, there’s no second bite of the apple.”
Six years ago, SPVs accounted for just 7% of private shares traded on Forge Global, a marketplace for private company stock. That number has since ballooned to 64%.
SPVs have been a cornerstone in major artificial intelligence deals of the past year, including OpenAI, Anthropic and CoreWeave, set to go public later this week. Magnetar, CoreWeave’s largest institutional investor, has used SPVs to help build its stake in the AI infrastructure company.
“We’re seeing a lot of fundraising through SPVs in artificial intelligence names — it’s a way to raise a large amount of money in a short mount of time,” Howe Ng, head of data and investment solutions at Forge Global, told CNBC. “The hotter the name, the higher the fee.”
AngelList, which also offers access to SPVs and secondary shares, noted a similar flurry. CEO Avlok Kohli said his platform has seen a 65% increase in SPV flows in the past year, in part because the venture market has started to recover after a gloomy few years when the story was all about inflation and higher interest rates.
Kohli said he’s seen some shady behavior in the SPV market. When he personally invested in a startup through a syndicate six years ago, he said there were multiple layers of fees and a lack of transparency.
“A bunch of things weren’t disclosed to me,” he said. “It was clear the person I invested behind had no idea what was going on at the company, and that that experience as a [limited partner] is seared into my brain. I would rather not have anyone else go through that.”
Kohli said AngelList often turns down SPVs that it can’t verify. In extreme cases, Kohli said, funds will pool together money to invest in a startup with no guarantee that they’ll actually own the stock. He called such behavior fraud, and said it takes place “in every bull cycle.”
‘Typically a bad sign’
There are differences this time.
In addition to a huge pipeline of high-valued companies that have been on the sidelines due to the dormant IPO market and the mountains of available private capital, employees at late-stage companies are cashing out through selling shares in secondary rounds, which has created more opportunities for SPV deals.
Private market gains are outpacing the stock market of late, attracting more interest from high net worth investors. Forge’s private market index is up 32% in the past three months, outpacing gains for S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq-100, which are down in the first quarter.
To invest in an SPV, individuals need to be “accredited” and meet certain thresholds set by the SEC. Qualification requires having a net worth of at least $1 million and earnings of at least $200,000 annually over the past two years. At that level, the SEC considers investors sophisticated enough to protect their own financial interests despite the risk of putting money in unregistered securities.
“Because these are private companies, it’s expected that you know what you’re doing,” Georgetown’s Dahiya said.
Hans Swildens, CEO and Founder of Industry Ventures, which focuses on secondary market investments, said access to information is a big challenge and transaction data is spotty. He estimated only 10% of secondary deals are made public.
“Most of the time, counterparties don’t want to disclose what they buy or sell,” he said. “They’re not writing a press release.”
The law requires that SPVs disclose their fees. But how much an SPV investor ultimately ends up paying can vary depending on the holding period of the asset. The longer the waiting period until an acquisition or an IPO, the bigger the return needs to be to make up for those fees.
Swildens said the SPV explosion has parallels to the peak of the dot-com bubble, when retail investors put cash into hyped-up internet companies.
“It’s typically a bad sign in our market, when retail shows up,” he said. “If retail keeps coming in and over the next year or two, and makes up a larger part of this market, I would say that that’s probably a good signal for institutional investors to take some risk off and sell.”
Mike Intrator, Chief Executive Officer and founder of CoreWeave, (C) rings the opening bell surrounded by Executive Leadership and family during the company’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq headquarters on March 28, 2025 in New York City.
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CoreWeave shares rallied more than 18% on Tuesday and looked to bounce back from a lackluster second trading day on the public markets.
Shares of the artificial intelligence cloud company, which rents out access to Nvidia’s graphics processing units to other technology companies, dropped more than 10% on Monday and fell below the initial public offering price of $40. The stock opened at $39 on Friday and closed flat at $40.
CoreWeave opened on the public markets Friday in the biggest venture-backed tech IPO for a U.S. company since 2021. It served as a key test for a public offering market that came to a near standstill about three years ago in the face of high inflation and rising interest rates that shunned technology investors
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Many hoped that CoreWeave would usher in a more favorable period for IPOs as companies such as ticket reseller StubHub, Klarna and Hinge Health join a mounting list of names readying in the wings.
CoreWeave’s disappointing performance has failed to lift investor confidence.
Markets have also sold off against a backdrop of macroeconomic uncertainty spurred by President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda. CoreWeave lowered its offering price to $40 last week from an initial expected pricing range of $47 to $55 range. The company also downsized the offering to 37.5 million shares from 49 million.
CEO Mike Intrator told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday that the company had to “scale or rightsize the transaction for where the buying interest was” against a backdrop of macroeconomic headwinds.
The company, which counts Microsoft as its largest customer, last hovered near a $19 billion market capitalization. Its most significant competitors include Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle.
In its prospectus filed in March, the company reported a net loss of $863 million. CoreWeave said revenue grew more than 737% last year to $1.92 billion.
Photo illustration shows the TikTok logo displayed on a mobile phone screen.
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For the second time this year, TikTok is staring at a deadline that could determine its fate in the U.S. and that of numerous creators and brands that have built businesses on the Chinese-owned social app.
The sense of urgency that led some creators to post wistful goodbye videos in January has shifted to a more cautiously optimistic outlook, with creators and firms saying they believe TikTok will remain in the U.S. They are, however, hedging their bets.
“I’m trying to be optimistic and hope that they keep it, but as a creator, I have to be prepared either way,” said Gianna Christine, a creator with 2.7 million TikTok followers.
TikTok could be effectively banned in the U.S. on April 5 because of a national security law originally signed by former President Joe Biden that requires its Chinese parent ByteDance to divest the app’s American operations. ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to sell TikTok, but Trump signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to not enforce the law, granting the Chinese company 75 more days to divest the U.S. portion of its business.
Gianna Christine makes lifestyle videos about living in New York City to her nearly 3 million followers on TikTok.
Gianna Christine
Like others who spoke with CNBC, Christine said she hasn’t received any direct updates from TikTok about its future. Christine said she’s staying positive about TikTok’s chances of remaining in the U.S. but she’s also expanding her presence on platforms like Snapchat and YouTube as a precaution.
“You never know what will happen,” Christine said.
Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said many positive comments about TikTok and used the app as a campaign tool. Trump said Sunday that he is “pretty certain” that a TikTok deal will be reached before the April deadline, according to AFP. Last week, Trump said he may extend the deadline if a deal isn’t reached and that he may reduce tariffs on China to help facilitate a transaction.
“I really don’t see TikTok getting banned,” said Olivia Plotnick, the founder of the Wai Social marketing and consultancy agency. “Trump really is going to want to show how amazing he is, and make a deal happen.”
TikTok and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Whatever is in store for TikTok, the company is acting like business as usual.
Current and former TikTok workers said they have received no communication from management about its future in the U.S. Brands and creators said they have received no updates from the company either.
That lack of communication and the uncertainty of the app’s future hasn’t stopped TikTok from moving forward with new partnerships.
Marketing firm Meltwater, for example, announced that it joined TikTok’s marketing partners program in March. Aditya Jami, Meltwater’s tech chief, said that his TikTok contacts seemed to be “in the dark” about the app’s future, but they went ahead with the partnership, which will require deep integration between the two companies.
“They are actually going to do more and more things that we can build together and then expose to our customers, so I feel like it’s going business as usual,” Jami said.
TikTok creator Alyssa McKay has more than 10 million followers, but she’s been proactive about diversifying her following across more platforms.
“If you’re not already posting on Snapchat, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, that’s where you need to be,” said McKay, adding that her efforts to get ahead of a potential ban have resulted in her already earning more revenue from other platforms than she does on TikTok.
Alyssa McKay is a content creator with over 10 million followers on TikTok.
Alyssa McKay
The first TikTok ban deadline didn’t significantly alter the social media postings from creators and brands, according to data provided to CNBC by Later, a social media and influencer marketing firm.
Social media users increased their posts on Threads and YouTube by 10% and 6%, respectively, the week of the TikTok ban in January compared to the week prior, according to Later. Still, the general posting habits of brands and creators during the week after the January deadline compared to the week preceding it were nearly identical, a spokesperson for Later said.
Throughout March, creators and brands steadily reduced the number of scheduled TikTok posts they plan to publish during the weeks leading up to the April deadline while increasing their scheduled Instagram posts, Later data showed. The March data suggests creators and brands are “reallocating content to Instagram as a safer or more stable alternative,” the Later spokesperson said.
For a brief moment, the Chinese social media app RedNote rose to the top of Apple’s app store during the week leading to the January deadline. Known as Xiaohongshu in China, that app has similar short-video features as TikTok, but it has a user base comprised mostly of women from more affluent Chinese cities that embraced the sudden influx of American users, Plotnick of Wai Social said.
“They were super welcoming, and it was a really fun time,” Plotnick said.
RedNote’s moment in the sun won’t likely repeat. The app is no longer a priority now that TikTok has resumed normal operations, creators and brands said.
“I don’t foresee buzz around alternative apps like RedNote,” Later CEO Scott Sutton said. “Those were a blip and lacked the staying power of other platforms.”
It’s unclear whether lawmakers who are concerned about the Chinese Communist Party or TikTok-competitors like Meta or Google would take to the courts to enforce the national security law, said Neil Chilson, a former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission who now heads AI policy at Abundance Institute non-profit. Taking that kind of legal action carries the risk of upsetting TikTok’s giant user base and Trump, Chilson said.
“Trump likes this sort of leverage that the law provides him,” Chilson said. “He’s obviously using quite aggressively — not quite in the text of the law — his latitude to make deals to continue to string this along.”
Amazon has restarted drone deliveries in two states after a months-long pause, the company confirmed.
In January, Amazon halted Prime Air deliveries in College Station, Texas, and Tolleson, Arizona, the two U.S. markets where it’s testing the service, as the company rolled out a software update to its drone fleet.
Amazon discovered an abnormality with the drone’s altitude sensor, caused by dust in the air, that could have caused its system to produce an inaccurate reading of its position relative to the ground, the company said. Amazon “never experienced an actual safety issue,” but said it opted to suspend deliveries while it corrected the issue.
The company brought drone deliveries back online last week after it completed the software update and received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, Amazon spokesperson Av Zammit said in a statement.
“Safety underscores everything we do at Prime Air, which is why we paused our operations to conduct a software update on the MK30 drone,” Zammit said. “The updates are now complete and were approved by the FAA, allowing us to resume deliveries.”
An FAA spokesperson didn’t immediately provide a comment.
Zammit said Prime Air has seen “unprecedented levels of demand” since it resumed service. David Carbon, an executive who oversees Amazon’s drone program, wrote in a LinkedIn post last week that the company dropped a bottle of ZzzQuil sleep medicine at an Arizona customer’s home in “31 minutes and 30 seconds.” Carbon didn’t say how far the drone had to fly and Zammit declined to provide details.
For over a decade, Amazon has been working to bring to life founder Jeff Bezos’ vision of drones whizzing toothpaste, books and batteries to customers’ doorsteps in 30 minutes or less. But progress has been slow, as Prime Air has only been made available in the U.S. in College Station and Tolleson. A test site in Lockeford, California, was shuttered last April. The program was also hit with layoffs in 2023 as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy cut costs across the company.
The company also introduced a new version of its delivery drone, called the MK30, which is designed to be quieter than previous models and can fly in light rain.
Customers in College Station, a quiet suburban town that’s about 100 miles northwest of Houston, had previously complained about the drones’ noise levels. After rolling out the MK30, the company is also taking steps to relocate its drone hub farther away from residents’ homes later this year.
Before Amazon suspended drone deliveries, the MK30 crashed in two separate incidents during test flights at the company’s facility in Pendleton, Oregon. Last December, a software issue caused two drones to crash, according to Bloomberg. And in September, a pilot mistakenly caused a “mid-air collision” between two drones after he tested how the MK30 would perform when faced with a failed propeller, according to a federal crash report.
Another crash occurred on Feb. 21 during tests at the Pendleton site, which resulted in a drone sustaining substantial damage, according to a report compiled by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Amazon said the crashes were unrelated to its decision to halt drone operations. The company has said these kinds of incidents, which have also occurred with other models in previous years, are part of the testing process, as it pushes drone systems “up to the limits and beyond.”