Analysis
The SEC accused Long Island-based The Spaventa Group and former broker Andrew Spaventa of running a boiler room that sold retail investors marked-up private shares in SpaceX, Anthropic, Anduril and Perplexity, according to Fortune. The SEC's complaint says the operation raised more than $74 million across 11 private funds run out of offices on Long Island and in New Jersey over four and a half years, from December 2020 to June 2025.
More than 800 people invested, the majority of them retail investors rather than institutions -- more than 650 put in $100,000 or less, and over 100 of the investors identified in the complaint were retirees. The funds marketed themselves on the promise of no 'unnecessary fees' and access to hard-to-reach private shares in some of the most sought-after AI and defense names on the market. The SEC alleges that promise was false: investors paid on average 46% more for their positions than the funds themselves paid to acquire the shares, and Spaventa and the entities he controlled collected roughly $23 million in fees that were never disclosed to the people paying them.
The secondary market's enforcement problem
The case lands squarely inside a structural gap in how private AI company shares reach retail investors. SpaceX, Anthropic, Anduril and Perplexity have all stayed private well past the point where comparable companies historically would have gone public, and none of them sell shares directly to retail buyers -- creating exactly the kind of opaque secondary-market demand that boiler rooms like Spaventa's are accused of exploiting. Because these shares don't trade on a regulated exchange, there is no public price retail buyers can check a markup against, which is precisely the information asymmetry the SEC says Spaventa's operation built its fee structure around.
Pulse has covered the AI funding boom driving Anthropic's valuation and SpaceX's public offerings extensively; this case is the first sign that the retail-investor appetite for exposure to those same private valuations is attracting the kind of fraud regulators historically associated with penny stocks and pre-IPO shell schemes, not marquee AI names.
What happens next
The SEC's complaint seeks disgorgement of the alleged $23 million in undisclosed fees plus civil penalties, though no criminal charges have been announced alongside the civil action. For the broader private-share secondary market, the case is likely to accelerate scrutiny of the platforms and brokers facilitating retail access to AI unicorns' equity -- a market that has grown large enough to draw SEC attention precisely because so much retail capital is chasing exposure to companies that have no near-term plans to go public.
