It's one thing to decide which private companies to invest in. It's another to actually acquire the shares as these companies are, by definition, private, and their stock doesn't trade on any exchange. How we assemble our portfolio of private holdings is an important detail to fully understand how PWRL operates.
Two Kinds of Private Transactions
When people hear "investing in a startup," they usually picture a primary transaction: the company issues brand-new shares to raise capital. That's a funding round. A secondary transaction is different, no new shares are created. Instead, existing shares change hands: an employee, founder, or early investor sells some of their holdings to a new buyer. The company doesn't raise money; an existing owner gets liquidity, and a new owner gets a stake in the company's future appreciation.
Why Secondaries Have Become So Important
As companies stay private for a decade or more, a liquidity problem is created: employees and early investors are sitting on valuable but completely illiquid stock, sometimes for years. Secondary transactions are the solution to this illiquidity. Secondary investments have grown from a niche corner of the market into a core mechanism for how private-company ownership is transferred, and they're the primary way PWRL builds exposure to the private companies that make up the PWRL fund.
So how do those shares end up inside a public fund?
Unlike public shares, private shares are restricted and hard to move, you generally can't transact private shares without jumping through hoops, so PWRL gains its exposure through a few different structures:
Direct secondary purchases. In some cases, the fund buys shares directly from existing holders through a negotiated secondary transaction.
Special purpose vehicles (SPVs). Often, the fund invests through an SPV, a one-off arrangement formed directly with a counterparty who owns the private shares to gain exposure to the underlying private company. PWRL puts money into the SPV, and the SPV holds the underlying shares, giving the fund indirect economic exposure to that company.
Forward contracts and call rights. Where shares can't yet be transferred, because of lock-ups or transfer restrictions, the fund may use forward agreements, advancing the purchase price now with the actual shares delivered later, once restrictions are lifted.
Why SPVs Matter
In many cases, SPVs are the only path to unlock access to scarce and challenging to source private shares. However investing through SPVs are a more complex path to gaining exposure to private companies and introduce an extra layer between the fund and the underlying company, which can result in additional fees to the fund, less direct transparency into the underlying position, and securities that are themselves illiquid. Despite the added burden of SPVs, they are an invaluable tool for the managers of PWRL to assemble the highly impactful portfolio of industry defining private companies.
Why Access Is the Real Moat
None of this works without relationships. The secondary market is capacity-constrained and relationship-driven, the best opportunities don't show up on a screen; they come from being trusted by founders, funds, and early shareholders over many years. That's the foundation PWRL is built on. For more than 16 years, the team at Akkadian has specialized in venture secondaries, closing more than 875 unique transactions and building deep relationships across the private technology ecosystem. PWRL applies that same sourcing engine and investment discipline to assembling and managing the fund.
The result is a closed-end, Nasdaq-listed structure designed to bridge two worlds: private-market exposure on one side, and public-market access and liquidity on the other.
