-- Harold Hughes has been on both sides of the private market table. He's raised millions, backed more than 50 companies including Partake Foods, Winx Health, AG1, and Liquid Death, and shuttered a company he'd poured years of his life into. Today, he's channeling every one of those experiences into Divi, a new platform launching to give everyday investors access to private market opportunities that were previously reserved for the few.
Divi guides investors from discovery through deal, from learning a company like SpaceX exists as an investment opportunity before it goes public, to actually getting in. The platform addresses awareness, education, and access in one place, closing the gap that leaves millions of capable investors on the sidelines.
"After shutting down Bandwagon, I had to step back and ask myself what I actually wanted to build, not what I thought I should be building," said Hughes. "Divi is the answer to that question. I'd spent a decade navigating private markets as a founder and an investor. The information asymmetry I'd benefited from wasn't something I could keep ignoring."
Hughes's path to Divi runs through nearly a decade of investing alongside building. His portfolio spans unicorns and emerging brands alike, investments made with real conviction, not passive capital. That experience gave him a clear view of the problem: everyday investors are sophisticated enough to identify great companies, but the infrastructure to back them simply hasn't existed. Until now.
Divi is working with community-oriented angel investors like Haley Bryant of Hustle Fund to bring more small checks onto the platform and into the ecosystem. “Most people are gated out of angel investing by income, not knowledge. The INVEST Act would change that, and platforms like Divi are how people actually get in: sharing deals, backing founders they believe in, and building wealth that used to be reserved for a few,” says Bryant, an early investor in Divi.
The timing is no accident. SpaceX's anticipated IPO created a cultural moment that made the problem impossible to ignore: millions of people who had tracked the company for years watched others profit from access they didn't know they could have had. Divi exists so the next moment like that doesn't pass anyone by; projected upcoming IPOs include Anthropic, OpenAI, and Stripe.
Divi is live now, backed by mission-aligned investors who believe the next wave of private market participation will come from communities that have been locked out the longest. Hughes notes that while many Divi users are new and aspiring angel investors, angel investors and syndicate leaders have been using Divi to track more than 1,000 portfolio companies since its launch.
"The goal was never a number," Hughes said. "It was proving that this community wants what we're building. The early signals say they do."
About the company: Divi is an AI-native private markets platform that gives angel investors and syndicate leaders a centralized hub for deal flow, portfolio tracking, and collaboration while opening those same opportunities to everyday investors through education and direct access to pre-IPO and syndicated deals. Divi is headquartered in Charlotte, NC.
Contact Info:
Name: Sam Zo, CMO
Email: Send Email
Organization: Divi
Website: https://divi.fund
Release ID: 89197233
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