I'm going to start with you, Rebecca. We all know Cathie and we all know just how responsible she is for a lot of sort of, I guess, the democratization, if you will, of a lot of investment vehicles. You're also doing something similar. And I'm wondering if you could just explain how deal maker fits into that landscape.
Sure thing. So what we're doing is bringing a really technology-driven approach to raising capital. If you think about it, if you recently invented capital raising today, it would be on the internet, it would be data driven and it would be democratized. And so that's what our technology brings. It essentially allows you to run ad campaigns and target investors who might be interested in your deal based on their digital profile.
I am curious, Kathy, about these new types of platforms. We talk about the evolution of financial markets. We went from a day and age where financial markets were just for institutional investors. Then you had, of course, the rise of mutual funds and then ETFs, of course. And then now a lot of new products in the private space are now trying to draw in individual investors. This is just the natural evolution as you see it.
Yes, it's not natural in a way, but I think during COVID, it was turbocharged. A lot of especially younger people who would not meet the accreditation standards. They were learning about new companies, investing themselves, trying to figure out what these new technologies were all about and happened upon private companies to which they had no or little access. And I think because of that and because I know we started our venture fund for that reason, they came to us and said, you know, how is it, we don't have enough, we don't make enough money, $250,000 per year? I think it is. Or we don't have $1 million in net worth to become accredited and have access to these incredible technologies early in their lifetimes. Can you help us solve that problem? And so, yes, that's why we started our venture fund. It has no carry and people can have access to first SpaceX, OpenAI, and Tropic, X, AI, X for as little as $500.
Okay. So that's one solution to democratizing access of these companies to everyday individual investors. Kathy, could you explain a little bit about what it is that Ark is doing with Dealmaker? Well, actually,
Our venture team met Rebecca recently, and I have yet to be briefed on exactly what we're doing together. Maybe Rebecca would want to talk about how far along we are.
Yeah, I think it's opportunities like this where we can understand. We can talk to Washington about what the investors and what the companies want. Like Dealmaker is taking a slightly different approach on it, where we see retail investors having a bit of a distrust of institutions today and companies wanting that one-to-one relationship with the brand. And so we're both two different businesses taking a totally different approach to the retail market. But understanding the power of this and how it can be transformative for the capital markets in a lot of different ways because let's face it, there's a lot of ways that the capital markets ecosystem is broken, that both what it's doing and Dealmaker is doing can help solve.
I was kind of going, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
So I was yeah, I was. That's what I thought had happened. We are so like minded. Charlie Roberts, who leads our VC effort, and Rebecca met at a conference, and we just thought, okay, we're both going at this from a little bit of a different way from different angles. But this idea of democratization is in its very early stages. So let's make sure we both encourage it.
Right. You both encounter the same issues and you're looking to solve it in your own ways. So, Rebecca, can you talk a little bit about the biggest pain points of capital raising that founders tend to face and how dealmaker solves for that?
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, access to capital is a challenge for a lot of investors, right? It's very difficult to get VC investment to actually fund a very small part of the ecosystem. And then there's a lot of brands that retail investors love and they want to participate in, and they can help amplify the business in a different way. So we have technology companies, you know, Moneygram's building a robotic knee surgery arm where they've got retail investors forming all of their beta users and really supporting bringing that business to life and driving revenue for them. So the reality is that businesses are built online today and there's a lot of different ways that retail can interact with these brands to help propel them forward.
Was there any issues when you were starting this, Rebecca, and were there any issues about regulatory concerns? I mean, we know that regulators, particularly here in the U.S., look over their shoulders and they sort of, I think, kind of as Cathy alluded to, look, they're saying, you don't have the net worth, so you must not be sophisticated enough to buy this type of vehicle. How did you navigate that regulatory side of this when you were coming up with this idea and building out the business?
Okay. Well, shameless plug. I think the regulators were brilliant in the way that they designed the legislation because the legislation protects investors already. So they put a cap on the amount that a retail investor can invest when they're not accredited. So they're not going to lose their shirt on any one single offering because we know some offerings are going to succeed and some offerings are going to fail. And so the main thing that we're driving for here is to make sure that the investors are protected. And the legislation did that already. And so there is a bill in the House right now that's probably going to pass with the new administration, that we're going to see the exemption limits go up from $75 million to $150 million. You've also got FIT 21, which is going to bring a lot of interest to the crypto space. So we see the snowball just rolling.
Now in terms of retail access to alts, Cathie, I do have to kind of ask you about the climate in Washington, and I know you have a lot of friends, either business wise or personal, in the incoming administration coming in, and there's been a euphoria, I'm sure you've seen it ever since November 5th, even slightly before that, when it became somewhat clearer that Trump was likely going to win. He's promising, obviously, a much more business friendly administration, one of deregulation. At the same time, he's also pitching fiscal policies that could potentially have some economic impact to the negative side. I am curious as to, I guess, what type of euphoria you're feeling and more importantly, what type of caution, if at all, you're feeling as well?
Well, if you look at the performance of our funds since the election, they've far outpaced the market, outpaced the MEG seven and so forth. So I think what the market is beginning to say is this administration is going to support innovative strategies, anything that will accelerate the growth, increase the productivity of our economy. Deregulation is going to be, we think, a very large part of that. Tax incentives, tax rate cuts as well. You mentioned the perhaps the cutback in government spending programs. You know, in our mind, government spending, longer term, is taxation in one form or the other. It has got to be paid for with increased taxes now, increased taxes later, or basically through inflation inflating away the debt. And so we think that's going to be very positive. This drive towards increasing the efficiency of the government, which will then limit the kinds of tax increases we've seen over the last few years and perhaps even continue to roll back taxes, leaving more for the private sector at the expense of sort of inefficiencies in the government sector.
So, Cathy, following on that, the president elect has outlined a number of initiatives that he wants to put in place as soon as he is inaugurated on January 20th of the different proposals, pro-growth items that he has on his to do list. Which do you think needs to be prioritized? Is it tax cuts? Is it immigration reform? Is it tariffs? Is it deregulation? Which of those things should be at the top?
Well, consider the source. So my answer might be different from President elect Trump's answer. But in terms of turbocharging growth, I think if tax rates, if this administration is going to cut tax rates, the most important thing it has to do is make sure they're retroactive to January 1st of 2025, because we learned this from the Reagan administration, if they defer or phase in tax cuts, businesses and individuals will wait for the lower tax rates and that can weaken economic activity. Beyond that, deregulation, a critically important. I think one of the reasons venture capital has had so much trouble during the last few years and strategies in the innovation space, especially in life sciences, is because M&A has been prevented by the FTC. That is going to change. So we are finally going to have price discovery as strategic buyers bid for these innovative companies. We'll see how much they're really worth. This has not happened in a long time. We also think, therefore, there will be liquidity events for private companies into the public world, which is also going to become very important.
Well, Rebecca, I'd like to get your thoughts on that as well, because when you look at the data for certainly in the first half of the year, I mean, VC funding activity was abysmal. We saw a definitely a bit of a pickup in Q3. I'm not sure what the fourth quarter has shown, but are you optimistic we're going to see more VC activity kind of to the point of what Cathie was talking about in terms of the catalysts? Is that going to really push this industry forward?
