Fundrise CEO Benjamin Miller on listing VCX on NYSE — a public venture fund with 100K investors up 85% in three years

Summary

Benjamin Miller, CEO of Fundrise, argues that VCX, a public venture fund listed on the NYSE last week, is the most disruptive development in venture capital since index funds entered equities.

The fund holds roughly 100,000 investors and has delivered 85% returns over three years, with average client performance at 40% per year. Its portfolio includes Anthropic, Anduril, Ramp, Databricks, OpenAI, and Intercom. Fundrise sources deals through product-led research. The 200-person team, including 100 software engineers, builds with or on tools it considers investing in. If the product works, Miller pursues the deal rather than waiting for inbound flow. He passed on Replit because his team does not use it. He went deep on Anthropic because they found it meaningfully better than any other enterprise AI product.

The listing

Every expert Miller consulted predicted VCX would trade at a discount to net asset value. It traded at a significant premium within days of listing. No other liquid, low-cost, regulated vehicle gives retail investors direct exposure to Anthropic or Anduril without carried interest or layers of SPVs. The demand existed. The wrapper did not. Miller remains unmoved by early criticism that the premium is too wide, noting it has been eight days since listing.

Fundrise announced a tokenization partnership with Kraken, which Miller views as the next phase of financial infrastructure for the product.

The flywheel

The commercial model compounds in two directions. For investors, VCX offers liquid access to private companies at low cost with no carry. For portfolio companies, Fundrise brings a 2 million-person customer base whose demographics it knows in detail by employer, job title, and geography. The Ramp partnership was Ramp's most successful channel partnership. A smaller company saw Fundrise drive 25% of its revenue growth in a single campaign. ServiceTitan, invested pre-IPO, received targeted outreach to Midwest small business owners.

Miller's long-run model mirrors Vanguard. It offers passive, evergreen capital on the cap table, fees that compress as AUM grows, and structural appeal to founders seeking long-term money rather than value-add theater. At $100 billion AUM, Miller estimates fees would reach tens of basis points, genuinely disruptive to traditional venture economics.

Selection

Previous attempts to democratize private markets became crowdfunding platforms with severe negative selection. Companies that could not raise elsewhere showed up first. VCX inverts that dynamic by sourcing from the inside out, targeting companies Fundrise already uses and knows work, then deploying its investor network as differentiated value-add on the cap table. This flywheel of more capital, lower fees, more investors, and more value-add separates it structurally from the crowdfunding wave.

Miller acknowledges the team-building challenge of scaling the investment function. In 15 years, the founding team has stayed intact and he has rarely found that high-pedigree external hires deliver. The more credible path may be identifying undiscovered talent, including people who came up as software engineers and bring a different approach to investment.