Before the IPO: How Hecto is turning the largest private companies into public tokens

For decades, the most valuable technology companies in the world remained effectively inaccessible. Retail investors showed up only after IPOs, institutions traded exposure quietly through opaque secondary markets, and a small circle of insiders set valuations. The pre-IPO market itself evolved slowly. Ultan Miller thinks that era is over.

As CEO of Hecto, and managing partner at FCA-regulated digital asset advisory firm Saxon, Miller sits at the crossroads of venture capital, crypto infrastructure, and institutional finance. He’s advised more than $300 million worth of blockchain and fintech transactions, invested millions of his own capital into early-stage tech, and built companies on both sides of the venture table. Now, he’s aiming higher—literally redefining how the next generation of mega-cap companies is accessed, priced, and owned.

Hecto is building what it calls the world’s first tokenized pre-IPO index, launching on Canton, the institutional blockchain backed by some of Wall Street’s biggest names. Its inaugural product bundles exposure to seven of the most powerful private companies on the planet—OpenAI, SpaceX, ByteDance, xAI, Stripe, Tether, and Anthropic—into a single on-chain instrument.

In Miller’s framing, these aren’t unicorns or even decacorns. They’re “Hectocorns”: private companies valued north of $100 billion that now define an era of AI-driven, capital-intensive innovation.

The premise is simple but radical: if public markets once told the story of a generation, today’s defining companies are being built—and staying private—long before an IPO ever arrives. Tokenization, Miller argues, is the missing bridge.

So how do you turn seven of the world’s most secretive companies into a single, investable token? And what happens if the AI boom stumbles, hardware bets sour, or SpaceX finally goes public?

We sat down with Miller to unpack the mechanics, the macro thesis, and why Hecto believes the pre-IPO market is about to move at internet speed.

How does one release a token that combines seven Hectocorns?

Miller: Each token represents exposure to a basket of seven late-stage private companies, with predefined weights, transparent valuation methodology, and institutional-grade controls. Investors mint the token by depositing capital into a dedicated vault, after which the protocol issues a series token whose value tracks the aggregated performance of the underlying basket. Operating on Canton enables privacy-preserving settlement, configurable permissioning, and compliance-ready workflows that are not feasible on public blockchains.

Operationally, the token functions as a programmable wrapper around diversified pre-IPO exposure, secured by Canton’s shared ledger and synchronisation layer. This approach allows investors to access multiple high-growth private companies through a single on-chain instrument, combining the flexibility of tokenization with the legal, operational, and risk-management standards expected by institutional market participants.

Is your team confident that an AI/tech bubble won’t burst in 26?

Miller: The team does not believe there is a discrete AI or technology “bubble” that is destined to burst in 2026. The current cycle is viewed less as speculative excess and more as a structural shift driven by real revenue growth, productivity gains, and sustained institutional adoption across AI and advanced technology. From that perspective, volatility is possible, but the underlying fundamentals do not resemble past bubble dynamics built purely on leverage or retail speculation. A potential IPO of SpaceX is also expected to inject meaningful liquidity into late-stage private markets, improving price discovery and setting public-market benchmarks that can positively re-rate comparable companies.

On the macro side, the outlook assumes a supportive liquidity environment. Expectations of continued monetary-policy easing and prospective U.S. Federal Reserve rate cuts are historically favorable for long-duration and risk assets. In parallel, mechanisms such as Reserve Management Purchases (RMP) effectively act as liquidity support for the financial system, even when not framed as traditional quantitative easing. Taken together, these factors underpin a view that the environment remains constructive for technology and AI assets, without relying on the assumption of an unsustainable bubble narrative.

Can companies be added to the token?

Miller: Yes. The index is designed to be dynamic, while remaining rules-based and transparent. If a constituent such as SpaceX exits the index following a liquidity event, the proceeds from that realization are not simply held idle. Instead, they are directed into a dedicated liquidity pool used to buy back the index token from the market, directly benefiting remaining holders and closing the value-capture loop at the index level.

Holders of the HECTO governance token vote on index composition changes as well as the launching of new indices. 

Regarding xAI: Critics and short-sellers argue that xAI’s heavy investment in GPUs (like Nvidia’s H100s) is a bet on hardware that may become obsolete within five years, potentially leaving the company with a balance sheet full of rapidly depreciating assets. Is this a concern? 

Miller: From Hecto’s perspective, this is not an idiosyncratic balance-sheet risk that the investor is being asked to underwrite directly. Hecto is designed as a passive index exposure, not a vehicle for underwriting operational decisions at the single-company level. The objective is to provide diversified access to leading AI and technology companies, including xAI, rather than to take a view on whether a specific GPU generation—such as **NVIDIA**’s H100s—will depreciate faster than expected.

At the index level, heavy investment in compute is viewed as a feature of the current AI infrastructure phase rather than a red flag. Capital intensity and hardware refresh cycles are common across frontier AI players, and their economic value is realized through deployed compute, software leverage, and downstream monetization, not residual hardware value. By structuring exposure as a basket rather than a single-name bet, Hecto allows investors to participate in the sector’s upside while diluting company-specific execution risks, including those related to hardware obsolescence.

What are the 2026 expectations of such a token? 

Miller: Expectations for 2026 are framed less around short-term narratives and more around macro conditions. Our view is that markets are primarily driven by global liquidity and U.S. Federal Reserve policy, rather than by isolated sector-specific fears. A backdrop of easing financial conditions, declining policy rates, and ongoing liquidity support is historically constructive for high-quality risk-on assets, particularly those with long-duration growth profiles.

Within that environment, a diversified Hectocorn index token is expected to benefit disproportionately. Late-stage technology and AI companies tend to re-rate when capital becomes more abundant and risk appetite improves, while index construction mitigates single-company volatility. As a result, we see 2026 as a potentially favorable period for a passive, quality-filtered technology index, assuming global liquidity remains supportive and policy direction continues to favor risk assets.