Sources
The line behind every real figure in the SPV tool, and what is illustrative and why.
Every real figure in this piece traces to a line here, with publisher, publication date where available, and the date I accessed it. All access dates are 2026-09-13 unless stated. The worked example and the three wrapper rows marked illustrative in the piece are arithmetic on inputs invented for this piece (stated under "What is illustrative, and why" below), following the generic soft-circle SPV structure the platform pages describe; they are labelled as illustrative in the text and need no external source. No confidential offering document was used, quoted or paraphrased; every platform term below comes from a filed Form CRS or the platform's own published page.
Independent origins: twelve rows, eleven origins with a figure (S2 is cited for the form's contents, not a number) — each row below is a distinct publisher reporting its own figure, and none is an echo of another. S8 was not retrievable from the publisher and was verified from its archived copy on 2026-09-14.
Retained for this piece
| # | Source | Publisher | Pub date | Supports | Archived |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S1 | 15 U.S.C. § 80a-3 — Definition of investment company, subsection (c) | Legal Information Institute, Cornell (statute text) | current codification | Statutory figure. § 3(c)(1): exemption for an issuer whose securities are beneficially owned by not more than one hundred persons (250 for a qualifying venture capital fund); § 3(c)(7): issuer owned exclusively by qualified purchasers and not making a public offering. The mechanism behind stacked vehicles | 2026-08-28 |
| S2 | Form D — Notice of Exempt Offering of Securities | U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC1972, 5/17; OMB 3235-0076, expires 2027-07-31) | 2017-05 (form version) | Primary form. Item 6 lists the 3(c)(1) and 3(c)(7) exemptions claimed; Item 11 minimum investment; Item 12 sales compensation and recipient CRD; Item 13 total offering amount and amount sold; Item 15 sales commissions and finders' fees; Item 16 use of proceeds paid to officers, directors or promoters. Cited for what a Form D discloses about a wrapper, not for any figure | 2025-12-23 |
| S3 | Know the Risks of Pre-IPO Funds and Potential Fraud | FINRA, Investor Insights | 2026-08-18 | Regulator guidance. Pre-IPO offers increasingly are interests in a fund formed to acquire shares or future interests in shares; costs of acquiring interests may require material growth to achieve a gain; many companies require approval of any transfer, without which the transaction may be void; the fund may hold the stock indirectly, leaving the investor several layers removed | 2026-09-14 |
| S4 | SEC Charges Boiler Room Operator and Three Entities with Defrauding Retail Investors in $74 Million Pre-IPO Investment Scam (Release 2026-75) | U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission | 2026-08-14 | Government figure (allegations in a filed complaint). More than $74 million raised from more than 800 mostly retail investors for eleven private funds, Dec 2020–Jun 2025; investors told they would pay no upfront fees or at most 12.5%; prices paid were on average approximately 46% higher than the prices the sponsor paid. Company names not stated in the release | 2026-09-14 |
| S5 | Hiive Markets Limited — Form CRS, Customer Relationship Summary | Hiive Markets Limited, via FINRA BrokerCheck (CRD 316580) | 2026-06-01 | Platform list price, filed. Commission charged to sellers, highest rate 5.75%, decreasing for transactions over $500,000; for transactions involving Private Funds a brokerage fee is charged to buyers, highest rate 4.85%, decreasing over $250,000; standard minimum $25,000; Private Funds may carry embedded management fees, administrative fees or carried interest paid to the fund or its sponsor, not to Hiive. Summary of material changes: highest commission rates revised | — |
| S6 | Forge Securities LLC — Form CRS, Customer Relationship Summary | Forge Securities LLC (wholly owned by The Charles Schwab Corporation), via FINRA BrokerCheck (CRD 134596) | 2026-04-20 | Platform list price, filed. Commission typically 2–4%, more or less in certain circumstances; typical minimum transaction $100,000, with a possibly higher commission below it; transactions through a private fund, including affiliate-managed funds, may bear a setup fee, management fees and performance fees payable to the fund or its sponsor; Forge may act as placement agent and receive a placement fee. The company's own fees page (forgeglobal.com/insights/forge-fees-explained/) returned HTTP 403 to retrieval; the filed CRS is used instead | 2026-09-14 |
| S7 | How do I invest on EquityZen? | EquityZen Help Center | updated 2026-02-19 | Platform list price, published. Sales fee 2.5% on investments up to $1 million, 2% above; on direct share acquisitions 2.5% up to $10 million, 2% above; typically no carried interest and no recurring management fee on non-actively managed funds; standard minimum $10,000, select opportunities $5,000; fee terms identical for all investors in a given fund | 2026-09-14 |
| S8 | Inside The Murky Market Selling Pre-IPO SpaceX And OpenAI Shares | Forbes (Phoebe Liu) | 2026-05-26 | Trade press. Reported range of upfront SPV access fees from under 5% to as much as 18%, on top of management fee and carry where charged. The publisher's page returned HTTP 403 on two retrieval attempts on 2026-09-13; verified from the archived copy, 2026-09-14 — the archived text says access fees range from less than 5% to as much as 18%. The [UNVERIFIED] mark was removed from both editions | 2026-08-27 |
| S9 | Generation Space Index — Quarterly Review of Global Private Investment, Q2 2026 | Generation Space / Seraphim Space (analyst estimate, stated methodology: trailing-twelve-month tracking of venture deals in the space sector, indexed to Q1 2018) | 2026-07 | Analyst estimate. $7.5bn invested in Q2 2026 ($8.0bn in Q1 2026); $23bn in the trailing twelve months to Q2 2026 ($9.7bn in the prior TTM); 141 deals in Q2, 620 in the TTM; average deal $72.5m, median $15m; Series D+ $7.2bn, 47% of total; seed 47% of rounds by count; SpaceX IPO priced 555.6m shares at $135, gross proceeds ~$75bn, ~$85.7bn after the overallotment | 2026-09-04 |
| S10 | Fusion Industry Attracts Record Annual Funding of $4.48bn, Raising Total to $14.24bn | Fusion Industry Association | 2026-07-13 | Company self-reports, aggregated by a trade association. 56 fusion companies raised $4.48bn in the twelve months to July 2026; $14.24bn reported cumulatively since the survey began in 2021; 56 companies surveyed, up from 23 in 2021; responses voluntary; no private/public split given | — |
| S11 | As SpaceX goes public, a $100 billion shadow market faces a reckoning | Fortune (Allie Garfinkle, Term Sheet) | 2026-06-11 | Reported estimate, origin of the estimate not named in the article. Secondary/SPV market for private shares in 2025 estimated at between $62.5 billion and $120.9 billion. No fee figures in the piece | 2026-09-14 |
| S12 | Space IQ — Space Investment Quarterly | Space Capital (analyst estimate; manually curated across Infrastructure, Distribution and Applications) | landing page, Q2 2026 report | Analyst estimate. $488 billion invested across the space economy since 2009. The quarterly figures sit inside a gated PDF and were not retrieved; only the cumulative landing-page figure is used, and only in this table as context — it does not appear in the piece text | 2026-09-14 |
Twelve rows, eleven origins with a figure (S2 is cited for the form's contents, not a number); S8 is verified from its archived copy. Of the eleven, ten carry a figure that appears in the piece: S1, S3, S4, S5, S6, S7, S8, S9, S10, S11. The Rocket Lab 10-K row that supported the old definitions box was dropped on 2026-09-17 when the box was rewritten to stand alone.
Archive gaps
scripts/archive_sources.py ran on 2026-09-13: 12 attempted, 10 archived, 2 refused. The Wayback save endpoint returned HTTP 500 for S5 (Hiive Form CRS PDF on FINRA BrokerCheck) and S10 (Fusion Industry Association release). Both remain gaps in the Archived column, to be retried on the next run; neither figure is affected, since both pages were read directly during the run.
One standard, applied
- Forbes "under 5% to 18%" (S8). Kept in the fee table because the watch flagged it and a reader will have seen it quoted. The publisher's page was not retrievable during the run; the range was verified from the Wayback copy dated 2026-08-27 on 2026-09-14 and the
[UNVERIFIED]mark was removed. No primary document states the range; it is trade press. - Qualified-purchaser dollar threshold. The statutory definition page (15 U.S.C. § 80a-2) returned truncated before subsection (a)(51), so the piece says "a higher wealth test" and prints no dollar figure.
- Space Capital Q2 2026 quarterly figures. Not retrieved (gated PDF); the Seraphim index (S9) is used for venture dollars into space instead, and labelled as an analyst estimate.
- Forge's "typically 2–4%". Forge's own fees page was blocked; the filed Form CRS carries the same range and is the source used. A secondary review site reports a post-acquisition 2.5% buyer fee; not traced to a Forge document and not printed.
What is illustrative, and why
The worked example's inputs were invented for this piece on 2026-09-14 and every dependent figure was computed by hand from them: subscription $50,000; management fee 2% a year for four years, prepaid, $4,000; expense reserve 1%, $500; placement fee 2%, $1,000; intermediate-vehicle markup 1.5%, $750; total load $6,250 (12.5%); net invested $43,750; 10% carry on gains above net invested.
Method. Effective entry is 50,000 / 43,750 = 1.143×. The investor is whole when V − c × (V − 43,750) = 50,000, V being the value of the stock and c the carry rate; the breakeven multiple is V / 43,750. At c = 0.10, V = 45,625 / 0.9 = 50,694 and the multiple is 1.159, printed 1.16×. At c = 0.20, V = 41,250 / 0.8 = 51,563 and the multiple is 1.179, printed 1.18×. With stock bought 10% over the round the underlying must rise a further 10%: 1.159 × 1.1 = 1.275, printed 1.27×. Convexity: at 0.8× the stock is worth $35,000, below the carry basis, so no carry; 35,000 / 50,000 = 0.70×, a 30% loss on a 20% move, downside capture 1.50. At 3× the stock is worth $131,250; carry is 10% of $87,500 = $8,750; net $122,500, 2.45×, a 145% gain on a 200% move, upside capture 0.725, printed 0.73; ratio 0.725 / 1.50 = 0.48. The nuclear fund unit (4% distribution fee, no management fee, no carry): 1 / 0.96 = 1.04×; at 3× it returns 2.88×, 94% of the asset's gain. They describe no real vehicle, and no figure or parameter from any other framework or document was used.