Shaires Holdings has put Anthropic, Stripe and ByteDance inside an AIM-quoted share, using a mechanic and a set of market rules that have not been available here before.
On 13 August, an AIM-quoted company announced binding agreements giving it exposure to seven private technology businesses: Anthropic, Stripe, ByteDance, Figure AI, SandboxAQ, Moonshot AI and Colossal Biosciences. Up to US$86.7 million committed, inside a single London-quoted share.
Shaires Holdings Ltd (AIM: SHR) is a series of firsts stacked on top of one another, and the one that says most about where the London market is going is the simplest. The people behind it are American. Executive chairman Suhail Rizvi founded Rizvi Traverse in 2004 and has invested more than US$3.5 billion across technology and media, with early positions in SpaceX, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. Chief executive Vivek Seth has spent more than 35 years in corporate finance and capital markets, advising on transactions exceeding US$110 billion. The team has been investing in late-stage private technology together since the early 2000s. Between them they had every reason to build this in New York, and they built it here.
Seth has been direct about why. “We chose London deliberately,” he said in the announcement. “Being quoted on AIM allowed us to build Shaires as an internally managed company rather than an externally managed fund. That structure puts management, public shareholders and in-kind contributors on the same terms. We would rather be invited in than be one more name in a crowded market. London is at an inflection point of its own, and we are pleased to be arriving as that renewal begins.”
That is the argument underneath the company. The most consequential technology businesses of this cycle are being built and repriced entirely in private, and by the time they list, much of the value creation has already happened. Anthropic, the frontier AI company behind the Claude models, reported a run rate topping $65 billion by the end of July and was valued at approximately US$965 billion at its most recent primary financing. It has never been a public company. Access to businesses at that stage has been the preserve of institutions, and Shaires exists on the premise that it should not be.
The timing argument is also core to their strategy. Management’s view is that the pioneering phase of the cycle, when investors were funding an idea and a team, has largely passed, and that what is in front of them now is a set of companies with products, customers and revenue, and growth that can be examined rather than imagined, with most of their adoption still ahead of them.
The second first is the mechanic. Founders, employees and early backers of private companies hold stock that is worth a great deal on paper and is very hard to sell, because the company controls who sits on its register. Shaires issues its own publicly traded shares in exchange for those private holdings. The contributor converts one illiquid position into a quoted, diversified one. The company obtains exposure that cash alone cannot buy. Two of the seven holdings arrived this way, SandboxAQ at US$14.8 million and Colossal Biosciences at US$12.0 million, both settled entirely in new Shaires shares rather than cash. A great many investors are offering these companies capital at the moment. Very few are offering their people a route to liquidity, and that is what management believe earns them access.
The third is where AIM comes in. Alongside its institutional placing, Shaires ran a retail offer, and it used a Capital Access Window to do it, the voluntary pause in trading introduced under the updates to the AIM Rules announced earlier this month. The mechanism exists so that a company raising money can reach a broader range of investors, retail included, rather than running an institutional book and letting everybody else read about it afterwards. Institutions, private investors and founders contributing their own stock all end up holding the same instrument, on the same terms, at the same time.
The fourth is the portfolio itself. Seven holdings today, weighted by conviction rather than spread thin, split between the frontier labs building general-purpose AI and the companies commercialising it across robotics, fintech, biosciences and quantum-adjacent compute.
Shaires is building towards around fifteen portfolio holdings, with up to US$500 million of further investment and contribution under negotiation, at varying stages of certainty. Management have said the strategy deliberately blends the household names with businesses that are not household names today but which they expect to be part of the vernacular tomorrow. It is permanent capital, with no fixed life and no wind-up date, so it is never a forced seller against a fund’s clock. It is internally managed, with a low-cost structure.
As Seth put it: “Elsewhere in public markets, these names might appear as a fraction of a fund or a line item in somebody else’s portfolio. Here, they are the whole point of the company.”
The full detail is in the announcements of 13 August 2026, published on the regulatory news service and at www.shaires-holdings.com.