Destiny Tech100 CEO Sohail Prasad on making private tech accessible: $100M Anthropic stake, 35 portfolio companies

Summary

Sohail Prasad founded Forge, a secondary marketplace for private company stock, which went public in 2022 before Schwab acquired it last year. He then launched Destiny in 2020 to solve what he saw as a structural inequity: most people use technology companies daily but have no way to own them.

Destiny Tech100 is a closed-end fund trading on the NYSE under ticker DXYZ. Prasad wanted to create something resembling "QQQ for private tech"—a product where anyone can buy or sell shares intraday through their brokerage account. An open-end ETF wouldn't work because the underlying private company shares lack sufficient liquidity to support daily creation and redemption. A listed closed-end fund solves that by letting shares trade on secondary markets between investors rather than directly with the fund.

The regulatory path took time. Prasad spent 19 months waiting for initial SEC registration before listing in March 2024. Another 15 months of waiting followed before the SEC approved a shelf registration that allows Destiny to raise up to $1 billion opportunistically to buy new companies.

Portfolio composition and strategy

Destiny started with roughly 20 companies and has grown to 35. The fund targets 100 portfolio companies total, intentionally ranging from early unicorns worth $1-3 billion with product-market fit to mature companies worth tens or hundreds of billions. Prasad published eligibility criteria on the website. Companies must have recent financing rounds, demonstrate growth metrics, and fit within late-stage venture-backed ecosystem benchmarks. The fund retains discretion on timing, structure, and pricing. This flexibility means Destiny can invest in primary rounds led by other firms such as SoftBank, secondary transactions from employees or early investors seeking liquidity, or direct partnerships.

When portfolio companies go public, Destiny doesn't exit immediately. Instacart, a portfolio holding, went public and Destiny held for several years before slowly divesting. Prasad frames this as balancing public shareholder expectations for private market exposure with a commitment to being reliable long-term partners for the companies.

Recent investments

Destiny closed a $100 million secondary purchase in Anthropic. It also invested in Skild AI as part of a SoftBank-led round and partnered with Beast Industries.

The NAV-to-market-cap premium that emerged at launch has narrowed as the fund has matured.