Charlie Bicker Caarten is Building Vaulto to Expand Access to Private Markets
Investing in high-growth pre-IPO companies remains one of the best ways to build wealth. But the traditional financial system is built for institutions, not individuals.
Retail investors are often locked out of lucrative investment opportunities, like investing in early stage private companies. So when companies like xAI grow 100x in mere months, retail investors have no way of capitalizing on the upside.
That’s why Charlie Bicker Caarten and David Andonovski are building Vaulto, a blockchain-based platform for private market investing.
Introducing Vaulto: The Permissionless Asset Exchange
Vaulto is a permissionless investment platform that lets anyone buy tokenized stakes in private companies — no accreditation, no $150K minimums, no gatekeepers.
Private markets are currently restricted to accredited investors—people with over $1M in investable assets. Platforms like Forge and EquityZen have begun to explore better alternatives to private investing, but the solution remains inacessible for most.
Vaulto is expanding access by building a better approach. The platform uses blockchain-based tools to offer tokenized investment opportunities, a type of token listed on the blockchain derived from traditional financial assets. Through these tokens, users can gain exposure to pre-IPO companies, like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
"We're building a new financial layer, one that is permissionless and equal,” Charlie explains. “So everyone that uses our platform gets the exact same service."
Having launched just nine months ago and secured the backing of UCLA through its accelerator program, Vaulto has over 3,000 users on its search engine and is set to launch its private market investment platform, which currently has over 350 investors on the waitlist, in the next two weeks.
Charlie’s Journey to Vaulto
Charlie grew up in South Africa, spending much of his childhood immersed in programming and entrepreneurship. At fifteen he taught himself Python, then spent the next few years learning new languages and building small side projects. Before long, he'd built 60+ projects on GitHub, and in 2021 started his first company to tackle the problems in the ridesharing industry.
Moving to the US to study business economics, Charlie became immersed in the entrepreneurship community at UCLA. He soon met David who was also studying Business Economics and had a strong passion for finance.
When the Palisades fires devastated much of LA in 2024, Charlie was shocked to learn that of the $150 billion total damage, just $50 billion was expected to be insured. He began to question how homeowners who had lost their houses could get the capital needed to rebuild. Before long he stumbled upon the idea of tokenization—homeowners could sell future equity in their home to raise capital.
Charlie shared the idea with David, who, with his background in finance, recognized that they could apply tokenization to democratize access to private markets and other traditionally high-growth investment opportunities. So they joined forces to build Vaulto.
The team is currently participating in the Venture Accelerator program at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and is working on scaling their private offerings. In the long run, Charlie aims for Vaulto to become a nationally recognised asset exchange for any financial product.
Charlie’s Advice for Fellow Founders
Vaulto's idea came from a real observation, and Charlie believes that's exactly how it should be. He emphasizes that founders must ground their ideas in user conversations before building anything. “Make sure that you're taking the time to really think about what you're building and for whom you're building,” he explains. “Do users really need it, and why are you going to be the person to solve their problem?”
And don’t be afraid to use the modern tools available to build lots of products until you find traction, Charlie adds. “The tools that we have available to us are unlike anything before. The ability for anyone to build, test, and fail, until they find a problem worth solving, is a key advantage that enables any young person to be an entrepreneur."
To learn more about Charlie’s founder journey, you can follow him on LinkedIn and visit Vaulto.ai.
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