Ondo Finance launched Ondo Private Markets on October 6, a platform that gives eligible non-US investors tokenized exposure to private companies with round-the-clock secondary trading, starting with a note on an unnamed leading pre-IPO artificial intelligence company.
Each tokenized note pays out based on the per-share value of the referenced company’s common stock at a qualifying liquidity event, such as an IPO or acquisition. Holders get the economics of the shares without owning them. The tokens carry no voting rights and no equity stake; Ondo states plainly that they are obligations of the issuer rather than shares of the company.
Secondary trading on the first note is expected to begin this week. Unlike traditional private-share sales, which involve brokers, paperwork and long settlement, the tokens trade continuously and can be held in self-custody wallets. Ondo says they are freely transferable and composable, which could let DeFi applications use them as collateral or yield assets, though it has not yet published a list of supporting venues or protocols.
Why private markets
Acting CEO Ian De Bode framed the launch around a gap in public-market access. In the United States, 87 percent of companies with more than $100 million in revenue are private, according to Ondo, which means most retail investors cannot buy into the companies driving current growth until an IPO. Ondo Private Markets is built to change that, De Bode said, with “24/7 trading on permissionless rails.”
The pre-IPO AI company is only the opening product. Ondo plans notes tied to private companies in robotics, cybersecurity, biotech, infrastructure, defense, energy and space. No names or launch dates have been disclosed, and the company has not said how it selects or verifies reference companies, a question that will matter more as the catalog grows. It has also not said whether the same reference company could appear in multiple competing products, as happened in tokenized-stock markets where several issuers wrapped the same equities.
Restrictions and open questions
Access is limited despite the “permissionless” framing. The tokens have not been registered under the US Securities Act of 1933, and both US persons and people acting on their behalf are barred from subscribing, acquiring or redeeming them. Ondo’s US business runs separately through Oasis Pro Markets, its SEC-registered broker-dealer subsidiary, which secured FINRA authorizations in July for tokenized equities, ETFs, mutual funds and private placements.
The launch revives a familiar dispute. When Robinhood offered tokens linked to OpenAI in 2025, OpenAI said the instruments were not OpenAI equity and that it had not approved any equity transfer connected with the product. Ondo has not said whether the AI company behind its first note participates in or endorses the product, and the issuer of the note has not been named. Buyers are effectively underwriting a legal structure as much as a company.
One structural detail is easy to miss. Because the notes are obligations of an issuer rather than claims on shares, a holder’s recovery in a bankruptcy or dispute scenario runs against the issuer’s balance sheet, not against the referenced company’s stock. Ondo has not published the issuer’s capitalization or any credit support behind the notes. In the Robinhood-OpenAI case the same structural point became the central controversy once the underlying company objected. Sophisticated buyers will price that counterparty risk into the token, and early secondary spreads will reveal how much of a discount the market demands for it.
There is also an information gap. Private companies do not publish the disclosures listed firms must file, so token buyers may be trading on limited data, and pricing before a liquidity event is largely opinion. Ondo says customers will receive offering documents including token terms, a subscription agreement and risk factors before subscribing, but offering documents are not quarterly filings, and none of the usual analyst coverage exists for a company that has never reported publicly.
The base it builds on
Ondo Private Markets sits on top of an established tokenization business. The company’s Ondo Stocks platform lists more than 450 tokenized stocks and ETFs with roughly $1.28 billion in value locked, up from the $1 billion milestone it crossed in May, and Ondo’s overall tokenized products hold about $3.7 billion across more than 1 million cumulative holders. Its public-stock tokens are backed by securities and cash held through US broker-dealers, with an independent verification agent checking the backing, a different structure from the contractual notes now launching.
Market structure questions remain too. Ondo has not published the list of secondary venues where the first note will trade, which matters because liquidity on permissionless markets is only as deep as the pools seeded behind it. The company says tokens are composable across DeFi, but no protocol has announced integration yet. Early spreads on the AI note this week will show whether market makers are willing to quote private-company exposure continuously or only in size, and that answer will shape how quickly Ondo rolls out the robotics, biotech and defense notes it has promised.
Timing matters as well. Ondo is entering pre-IPO exposure weeks after Anthropic’s reported filing for a public listing intensified interest in late-stage AI valuations, and after years in which retail investors watched private AI rounds deliver returns they could not touch. That demand is exactly what the product is built for. Whether it converts into sustained liquidity, rather than a burst of interest around the first listing, is the question the next few weeks will answer.
The first trades settle this week. If the AI note attracts deep liquidity, expect fast follow-on launches across the sectors Ondo has named; if it trades thin, the 24/7 promise will matter less than the depth behind it. Either way, the line between a token that tracks a private company and actual equity ownership just got another test case.