Venture has a DPI problem.

We are in the middle of a venture supercycle. However big it looks, the smartest insiders .

Entry valuations feel rich. Exit liquidity is almost absent. But a handful of private companies will create an , so sitting out is not an option.

Fortunately, the Growth stage — companies in the $1-5B valuation range — solves for both. It has the best , with venture-like 5-10x returns and operating history to underwrite on fundamentals. And for the first time in private market history, the portfolio can be managed to generate 1x DPI within 2-3 years.

At Underline, we call this active venture.

We have already this strategy for a decade. We’ve made hundreds of (personal + fund) investments in venture with a ; and building the largest secondary desks at Forge and Hiive, where we facilitated . And we’ve proven the ability to without sacrificing venture-like upside.

We’ve invested at every stage over the last decade, developing a fine-grained intuition for the private markets (30+ growth & late-stage checks, 200+ early stage checks, 60 LP checks in 30+ funds).

Her’s our growth / late-stage track record:

85%+ IRR over the last 3 years.
49% IRR over lifetime (since 2018).
1.5× MOIC | 1.3× DPI on exits from the earlier (2018–22) cohort.

Prior personal track record; realized and unrealized marks across 30+ Growth & Late-stage investments; names disclosed to qualified partners.

In a power law game, IRR comes from compounding alongside great companies. Traditional VCs have perfected this art: select companies, win allocation, and hold until IPO.

That is not the only strategy, though. They were not built for secondary execution, continuous position sizing, or finding DPI before the IPO.

There are plenty of ways today to manage concentration while retaining most of the upside — if you know how (with company permission, or internally via continuation vehicles).

Solely by way of example: selling 15% after a 3× and another 15% after a 5× generates >1× DPI while keeping nearly 75% of the original position. This is a no-brainer from a risk-management standpoint, and yet we do not see this as a widespread practice.

Deep research and constant vigilance to identify the next Anthropic, Databricks, or Stripe amongst hundreds of unicorns. No piling into overbought consensus names. Never spray-and-pray into companies with multi-billion dollar rounds that are pre-product / pre-revenue. Active oversight to manage portfolio construction, concentration risk, and DPI. Unique expertise in diligencing idiosyncratic opportunities and structures.

Hari Raghavan

Investments•Research

Clara Vydyanath

Market Pulse•Execution

Pratik Sharma

Investor Relations

Prior personal track record throughout; realized and unrealized marks as of June 30, 2026 unless otherwise noted. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Facilitated transactions are not principal investment performance. Market data: Caplight, Pitchbook.