Navigating Private Markets: Opportunistic Investing in Tech, AI, and Tokenized Assets

Navigating Private Markets: Opportunistic Investing in Tech, AI, and Tokenized Assets

Private markets have long been the domain of institutional investors and the ultra-wealthy. Access to companies like SpaceX or OpenAI before they list on a public exchange requires deep connections, compliance infrastructure, and capital commitments that sit well beyond the reach of most professional investors. Uwe Paßmann, Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Munich-based COMETUM, is working to change that. In a conversation with Dr. Henning Stein for 1BusinessWorld's Intelligent Capital programme, Paßmann outlines how COMETUM is opening access to late-stage growth equity through regulated structures, tokenized securities, and a distribution model built around wealth managers and asset managers.

The session covers the mechanics of secondary market investing, the important distinctions between private equity, venture capital, and non-listed growth equity, the role of MICA regulation in enabling tokenized private market products, and Paßmann's prediction that private market allocations will represent 10 to 20 percent of investor portfolios within the next decade.

Opening the Private Market to a Broader Investor Base

Paßmann opens by framing the core ambition behind COMETUM: making private market investments as easy to buy as a publicly listed stock. While that goal may sound straightforward, the gap between intention and reality reflects just how fragmented, opaque, and structurally complex private market access remains for anyone outside the largest institutional pools of capital.

The underlying premise rests on a basic observation about the global equity landscape. The vast majority of companies around the world are not listed on any stock exchange. Of those that have achieved significant scale, commercial recognition, and global reach, only a small fraction have taken the IPO route. This means that a substantial portion of the most compelling growth opportunities available to investors exists entirely outside public markets today. Names like SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, and Stripe remain private, and exposure to their growth trajectories is inaccessible through conventional brokerage accounts.

COMETUM's current entry point for individual investors is 25,000 euros. Paßmann describes the target client as an affluent investor, a high-net-worth individual, or a smaller institutional investor who has historically lacked a practical, regulated pathway into this asset class. The minimum ticket is designed to lower the barrier meaningfully without opening the product to retail investors, which would require an entirely different regulatory approach.

Distinguishing Late-Stage Growth Equity from VC and Private Equity

One of the most instructive moments in the session comes when Paßmann draws a clear line between three frequently conflated categories: venture capital, private equity, and what COMETUM calls non-listed growth equity.

Venture capital typically enters companies at pre-seed, seed, or early series rounds. The risk profile is commensurately high, with significant uncertainty around whether the underlying business model will work at all. Private equity, by contrast, often involves acquiring majority stakes in established businesses, frequently bundling multiple companies into a portfolio and applying operational and financial strategies before exiting. Liquidity in private equity is constrained by the complexity of divesting a majority position, and fund structures typically lock investors in for five to ten years.

Late-stage growth equity, the asset class COMETUM focuses on, operates differently. These are companies that have already completed multiple funding rounds, achieved global scale, and carry valuations placing them firmly in the unicorn category or above. As Paßmann describes them, they are household names. The business model risk associated with early-stage investing has largely been resolved. What remains is exposure to continued growth ahead of an eventual liquidity event, whether through an IPO, a direct listing, or a large secondary transaction.

The distinction matters for the risk-return profile an investor accepts. Paßmann argues that the late-stage segment offers a compelling combination of lower business model risk, meaningful upside relative to public equity, and an investment horizon more compressed than traditional private equity funds. COMETUM's recommended holding period ranges from one to five years.

How Secondary Market Investing Works in Practice

COMETUM accesses its target companies primarily through the secondary market rather than through primary funding rounds. Paßmann explains that primary series rounds are restricted in timing, limited in availability, and largely within the purview of established venture capital relationships. The secondary market, by contrast, allows COMETUM to identify sellers at the right volume and price and to take on their position in a given company.

The sellers in any given secondary transaction can be employees exercising or monetizing their equity, early investors seeking liquidity, or funds managing their own portfolio timelines. For the most prominent late-stage US technology companies, Paßmann notes that the process is often structured through controlled tender offers, where companies set the framework for how employees can sell and who is eligible to become a new shareholder. This means entry is not simply a matter of identifying a willing seller. It requires being credentialed, connected, and positioned as an acceptable counterparty from the company's perspective.

For an investor buying through COMETUM, the mechanics are simplified considerably. Rather than navigating broker networks, offline investor communities, and fragmented pricing information directly, the investor receives a structured product that holds the underlying shares as an asset-backed security. The investor does not hold the shares themselves, but the structured product is fully backed by those shares. Paßmann is explicit about the advantage this offers relative to traditional fund structures, where investors commit capital to what he describes as a blind pool and have limited visibility into the actual assets or the per-share entry price. With COMETUM's model, the investor knows exactly which company they are gaining exposure to and at what price per share.

Tokenization, MICA, and the Regulatory Advantage

A thread running through the entire conversation is the role of regulatory infrastructure in enabling the products COMETUM builds. Paßmann references the firm's most recent capital raise, which brought in nearly five million euros in a short period through a tokenized investment product. That product was structured under the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, known as MICA, which Paßmann describes as a genuine enabler for asset-backed tokenization at scale.

The SpaceX investment offered to COMETUM clients was made available as an asset-backed token. Each token represents an interest in a structured product holding underlying SpaceX shares. The security carries both an ISIN and a VICA, meaning it can be delivered into a traditional securities portfolio or a digital wallet, depending on the investor's infrastructure. The practical implication is that a wealth manager in Munich or Zurich can include a COMETUM product in a client's portfolio using exactly the same process they would use for a conventional listed security.

Paßmann does not romanticize tokenization as a technology. He draws an explicit parallel with the uncertainty surrounding which AI models will ultimately dominate their respective markets: the eventual use cases and winning applications of tokenization remain to be determined, and the sensible response is diversification rather than a concentrated bet on any single format. What he does credit is the regulatory framework itself. MICA provides standardized investor protections and a level playing field for issuers, converting what was previously a compliance-heavy and fragmented process into something approaching a scalable product category.

COMETUM currently operates outside the United States. Paßmann is candid about this, noting that while the investment targets are predominantly US-headquartered technology companies, the investor base spans Europe and other markets, deliberately excluding US clients until the appropriate domestic regulatory licenses are in place. He identifies the US market as a clear strategic ambition for the firm, pointing to platforms like Forge as evidence of an established private market data and transaction ecosystem that COMETUM would seek to operate alongside.

Sectors Driving Demand: AI, Defense, and Beyond

Paßmann identifies artificial intelligence as the most active area of investor demand at present, while being careful not to reduce the investment thesis to a single subsector. The companies generating the most interest from COMETUM's client base include the leading private AI infrastructure players, but the conversation also encompasses the broader ecosystem that AI growth depends on: data centers, energy infrastructure, and quantum computing.

On the AI side, Paßmann shares a perspective that aligns with Stein's observation about the competitive landscape. Multiple well-resourced models are pursuing broadly similar capabilities, and the question of which will produce durable competitive advantage remains genuinely open. Paßmann's investment philosophy reflects this uncertainty. Rather than concentrating a position in a single AI company, he advocates for diversified exposure across the sector, noting that historical precedent in technology markets suggests dominant positions are rarely permanent, and the timing of any single bet is impossible to predict with confidence.

Defense represents a second area of growing interest. Paßmann points to companies like Anduril and Shield AI as examples of private defense technology firms attracting significant investor attention, supported by expanding government budgets and geopolitical pressure across NATO member states. He notes that Munich itself is becoming a recognizable defense technology cluster, reflecting a broader European shift toward domestic defense investment that is creating new private market opportunities at scale.

Paßmann also highlights prediction markets, citing Polymarket specifically, as a sector he is actively watching. He describes Polymarket as a company that recently closed a round with participation from the New York Stock Exchange as an investor, and argues that the underlying data infrastructure for financial applications in this space carries significant long-term potential. Stein adds that prediction markets offer a distinctive information signal, reflecting the aggregated conviction of participants who often have advance knowledge of outcomes in specific domains, which makes them a useful real-time indicator even for investors approaching them purely as an analytical tool.

Pricing, Transparency, and the Challenge of Fair Value

One of the structural challenges in private market investing is that pricing lacks the transparency and real-time depth of a public exchange. Paßmann addresses this directly when Stein raises the question of how COMETUM ensures it is paying a fair price for the positions it acquires.

The approach is methodical rather than algorithmic. COMETUM surveys the market for multiple buy and sell offers on any given company, seeking enough data points to triangulate a defensible price range. For companies with high secondary market activity, this process is relatively straightforward. For companies with tightly controlled or infrequent secondary transactions, the available pricing signals narrow to indicators like the last completed funding round and market speculation about upcoming rounds, which introduce considerably more judgment into the valuation process.

Paßmann cautions that publicly available pricing data from platforms like Forge should be interpreted carefully. These prices reflect completed transactions, but they do not incorporate the fees, structuring costs, KYC onboarding, SPV requirements, or broker intermediation that a real investor would encounter when attempting to replicate those trades. The headline price visible on a data platform is an indication of market direction, not a comparable benchmark for an all-in investment cost.

How COMETUM Reaches Investors: The B2B2X Model

COMETUM does not primarily pursue end investors through direct channels. Paßmann describes the firm's go-to-market approach as B2B2X, a distribution model that positions COMETUM as a product provider working through established wealth managers, brokers, and asset managers who then offer the products to their own client bases.

In practice, the affluent individuals and high-net-worth clients who ultimately invest through COMETUM products typically arrive via an existing banking or advisory relationship. The wealth manager or asset manager handles the client relationship, the transaction, and the portfolio integration, while COMETUM provides the underlying structured product and regulatory infrastructure. This model reduces distribution cost and compliance burden for COMETUM while extending its reach through intermediaries who already hold the client relationships.

Paßmann observes that when he examines portfolios across Germany and Europe more broadly, private market investments remain significantly underrepresented relative to what would be considered an optimal allocation. He sees this gap as both a commercial opportunity and a structural inefficiency in how European capital is deployed. The combination of low-minimum regulated products, transparent per-share pricing, and integration with existing brokerage infrastructure is designed to remove the practical barriers that have kept private markets out of most professionally managed portfolios.

Lessons from Building: Listening Over Pitching

Stein invites Paßmann to reflect on a moment in building COMETUM where things did not go as planned. The example Paßmann offers is straightforward. In the early days of the firm, the team selected a company they believed was compelling and presented it to potential investors expecting demand to follow the thesis. It did not. No one wanted to invest.

The correction COMETUM made was fundamental. Rather than continuing to lead with supply-driven selection, the firm shifted to listening to its clients first, asking directly what opportunities they were actively interested in and building product availability around that expressed demand. Paßmann frames this as more than a sales tactic. It reflects a genuine belief in what he calls the educated investor: a professional or sophisticated individual who is capable of forming their own view on whether a given price point for a given company represents an opportunity worth taking.

He illustrates the cost of second-guessing that conviction with the example of OpenAI and SpaceX. A year prior to this conversation, both companies would have prompted the same debate about valuation that they prompt today. Investors who acted on the opportunity a year ago have since seen returns of three times or more. Paßmann's point is not that every conviction-led investment will produce that outcome, but that the role of the platform is to create access and informed choice, not to substitute its own judgment for the client's.

A Ten-Year Outlook for Private Market Allocation

Stein closes the session by asking Paßmann for his boldest prediction about how a normal investor portfolio will look in ten years, and what role COMETUM plays in getting there.

Paßmann's answer centers on portfolio construction rather than any single company or sector. He anticipates that within a decade, the typical professionally managed portfolio will carry a 10 to 20 percent allocation to private markets. He frames this not as an aspirational preference but as a structural necessity. Companies of global significance increasingly remain private for longer, which means that public market exposure alone captures only a fraction of the growth available in the most dynamic segments of the global economy. Capital that seeks meaningful returns above a core ETF allocation will need to find pathways into private markets to generate the alpha that clients expect.

Stein adds context that Paßmann affirms: the era of public markets reliably trending upward may be giving way to a period of sideways or declining returns, making alternative allocations not just attractive but necessary for advisors who want to deliver differentiated outcomes for their clients. The 60-40 portfolio model, already under sustained pressure, looks increasingly inadequate as a standalone framework for long-term wealth management.

For COMETUM, the path to that future runs through product accessibility, regulatory compliance, and a distribution architecture that makes private market exposure as operationally simple for a wealth manager to integrate as any other asset class in their toolkit. Paßmann's case is that the barriers keeping most investors out of private markets are not permanent features of the asset class. They are infrastructure problems, and infrastructure problems can be solved.