Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with AI Private Opportunities Trust (ASX:AIX), Executive Director Adam Myers
Lel Smits: Artificial intelligence is creating some of the world’s fastest growing and most valuable companies, but many of the biggest opportunities remain private and inaccessible to most investors. AI Private Opportunities Trust is listing on the ASX this Thursday after having raised more than $265 million and will be focused on providing Australian investors with exposure to leading private AI companies through a market-first ASX-listed investment vehicle. I’m joined today by Pangana Capital Group’s Executive Director, Adam Myers, to discuss the growing AI investment opportunity, why investors may be structurally underexposed to private AI, and how AIX aims to provide access to this rapidly evolving sector.
Adam, welcome back to the Stock Network.
Adam Myers: Thanks Lel, always a pleasure to chat to you.
Lel Smits: Now, there are many ways for investors to gain exposure to AI, but very few provide access to leading private AI companies. Can you outline why you’ve decided to launch and list AIX and also how it differs from the AI investment options that are currently available to Australian investors?
Adam Myers: You are right, that is a great question because there are many ways to access AI, but the exposure is invariably diluted by other business activities. Google is probably a great example. They have these awesome AI assets, DeepMind, Gemini, the TPU and cloud infrastructure, the list goes on.
But still, most of the Google economics are associated with search and advertising, and that side of the business can be completely disrupted by AI. So, the private companies that we aim to invest in are more likely to be pure exposure. If you think about businesses like OpenAI or Anthropic, those businesses don’t exist outside of the AI opportunity, and those are the kinds of businesses we’re targeting.
Lel Smits: And Adam, when people think about AI, they do often focus on those handful of well-known names. You’ve outlined some businesses already, but what types of businesses will AIX be investing in, and where do you see the most compelling opportunities that are really emerging across the whole AI ecosystem?
Adam Myers: The ecosystem itself is compelling. We believe that it’s compelling. It is evolving rapidly. We aim to invest across that ecosystem. So, if we think about what the ecosystem looks like, a significant portion is the foundational models.
Those are the OpenAIs, the Anthropics. I mentioned Google Gemini, but that’s already a listed opportunity. Bartons also has a foundational model, as does SpaceX.
So, a significant portion of capital will be allocated there. We will also invest in what we call the picks and shovels part of the AI economy. So, all of the businesses providing the infrastructure, the connectivity, enabling the foundational models to generate the AI and enabling people to utilise the inference.
So, we will invest in that. We will invest in agents, which are software tools specifically designed to perform specific tasks, and in the real-world implementation. So, here I think about robotics, think about bringing AI into the laboratory, that sort of thing.
Lel Smits: Adam, many of the biggest valuation gains are now occurring while companies remain private. How does AIX’s ASX-listed structure help investors to access this trend? Also, if you can outline what really makes it different from other investment vehicles?
Adam Myers: Perfect. So, firstly, investing in private companies is typically the domain of ultra-high net worth or institutional type investors.
The minimum investments are often extremely large, typically sort of five to ten million dollars, and cash flow management associated both with making the investments and then maintaining them is quite complicated. So, typically, the average investor, even the average wealthy investor, doesn’t get access to these kinds of businesses. But if you’re one of those extremely large investors and you can manage the complexity, you can manage the minimum investment sizes, it’s still difficult to get access to the leading businesses in this space.
Whenever these companies raise new capital, the rounds are over-subscribed and the issuers, the companies themselves, they prefer to deal with familiar investors. So, we have partnered with one of those familiar investors. In fact, we’ve partnered with what is probably one of the most familiar investors, a really significant player in the space who can access all the leading AI opportunities, get access to those businesses and institutional pricing, and then we have packaged it into this portfolio.
So, you’re not taking a single bet. We diversify across the ecosystem that I described and we are making this opportunity available in a way that is completely accessible for investors across the spectrum.
Lel Smits: Adam, thank you very much for the introduction to the AI Private Opportunities Trust and all the best for the listing on the ASX this week.
Adam Myers: Thank you, very excited.
Ends