MW The hot Fundrise VCX fund falls 45% as IPO mania subsides and investors get a crash course in risk

By Christine Ji

A buzzy fund offering access to pre-IPO AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI is trading well above the value of its underlying assets, even with its sharp recent decline

Shares of the Fundrise Innovation Fund reached a peak of $575 on Wednesday.

Shares of a hot fund that promises retail investors access to private technology companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX are now coming back down to earth - underscoring the risks of piggybacking on market hype.

When the Fundrise Innovation Fund $(VCX)$ debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on March 19, investors rushed at the chance to own a basket of hot artificial-intelligence startups. In the ensuing days, shares of the VCX soared 1,840% en route to an intraday peak of $575 on Wednesday.

Read on: This fund jumped 1,200% on Anthropic and SpaceX hype. Retail investors should be cautious.

But the fund has seen a major comedown since then. VCX has plunged 64% from those peak levels and was off 45% in Thursday's session alone.

The situation has the hallmarks of a meme-like trading frenzy. Retail investors have limited opportunities to get in on trendy private companies that are disrupting the U.S. economy, hence the initial mania. But underneath the rally was a fundamental valuation mismatch that makes Thursday's sudden drop unsurprising.

Investors had been paying massive premiums for a fund with a net asset value of $18.26 a share. On Wednesday, VCX reached a peak of $575, trading at over 31 times NAV. That means investors were paying more than $31 for every underlying $1 of VCX assets.

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Even at the current price, VCX trades at over 11 times NAV. That's an anomaly for closed-end funds such as VCX, which typically trade at a discount to NAV on the stock market.

Another reason that VCX's swift rise and fall shouldn't be too shocking is that this story has played out before.

The trading action bears similarities to what happened two years ago with Destiny Tech100 DXYZ, another closed-end fund that invests in private, venture-backed tech companies. DXYZ experienced a similar initial growth trajectory, trading as high as $105 upon launch in March 2024 with a NAV of less than $5. Today, DXYZ's NAV has grown to $19.97, and shares of the fund trade at $29.35.

-Christine Ji

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March 26, 2026 13:39 ET (17:39 GMT)

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