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Rebecca Kacaba (DealMaker) on Retail Capital & the AI IPO Wave
After a MetaView sponsor read, DealMaker's Rebecca Kacaba joins for her second appearance on the show. She recaps retail's growing role in capital markets — SpaceX allocating 30% of its round to retail versus the typical 5–10%, and brokerages like Robinhood, Fidelity and Schwab lowering IPO minimums — and weighs whether Anthropic and OpenAI will follow with large retail allocations. She shares DealMaker survey findings showing retail fear about AI's economic impact, argues accredited-investor rules still lock everyday people out of private companies, and notes rising retail demand in categories like robotics as IPO capital returns to the market.
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Rebecca Kacaba (DealMaker): Raising Capital from Retail Investors
Rebecca Kacaba, CEO and co-founder of DealMaker, explains how the platform helps North American companies raise capital from retail investors, with regulation built into the technology so 'it's as easy to sell shares online as it is to sell shoes.' She lays out the brand benefits of retail shareholders — organic promotion, beta testers, and holders who don't flip at IPO — and points to rising retail allocations (OpenAI, SpaceX, Gemini) and a $73M retail offering with a $2,300 average check. She also covers trends like under-35s opening trading accounts six times more often, retail demand for AI, robotics, defense and consumer brands, and her founding story as a capital markets lawyer who wanted everyday people to access the asset class where real wealth is made.
Samuel Beek (Schematik): $4.6M Pre-Seed & Cursor for Hardware
Samuel Beek reveals the news he kept quiet on his last appearance: Schematik raised a $4.6M pre-seed led by Lightspeed. He describes Schematik as 'a cursor for hardware' that turns a prompt into a parts list, wiring instructions, and deployable code, and tells how a Saturday launch — forced when Wired moved its story up — reached 200k+ people on X and ~100k on LinkedIn, arguing weekends are an underused launch window. He says in a post-AI world founders must own distribution by making their own content, explains the mission of making hardware as easy as building a website, points to personal-hardware trends like cyberdecks, DIY synths, and a Linear designer building his daughter a speaker, and teases a Hugging Face-style marketplace for hardware designs.