Stacked SPVs Cause Double Fees
Noel Moldvai, CEO of Augment, on building the Robinhood for private markets
Stacked SPVs turn access into fee layering, which means the investor can overpay twice, once on entry price and again through multiple managers taking economics on the same underlying shares. In practice, one fund buys a block of private stock, then another vehicle buys into that fund, so the end buyer owns an interest in a vehicle that owns another vehicle, not the shares directly. Each layer can add management fees and carry, while also making diligence, transfer rights, and exit mechanics harder to see through.
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A 1 and 10 first layer plus a 2 and 20 second layer means the investor is effectively paying both sets of fees on the same asset. That is what people mean by 3 and 30. The fee stack is additive across layers, even before any markup to the last round price.
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The layering usually happens because the best names are hard to access directly. In restricted companies like SpaceX, smaller buyers often cannot get onto the cap table, so they buy through an SPV, and if they cannot access that first SPV, they buy through another one above it.
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This is exactly why newer platforms are pushing simple structures with one upfront fee or 0 and 0 economics instead of ongoing carry. The product goal is to give investors one clean container for the shares, not a chain of intermediaries each taking a cut.
The market is moving toward fewer layers, more standardization, and more trading at the SPV interest level rather than repeated repackaging. As private company liquidity gets more productized, the winning structure will look less like nested funds and more like one transparent vehicle with clearer pricing, faster settlement, and no surprise economics eating the upside.