Historically, most innovation and disruption actually happens in the private market. You don’t often have it being driven by public market companies. Hi, my name is Christian Munafo. I joined Van Eck in April of 2026 as a portfolio manager and the head of our private growth initiatives. I started my career at the peak of the internet bubble. And I remember as an investment banker very low on the totem pole. One of my first engagements I was staffed on was the largest technology acquisition.

Of all time. And within less than a year, the internet bubble essentially burst. And that really just opened my eyes to the cyclicality, especially of the sell side. And when things are good, they’re really good. And when they’re not, it’s not the best place to be. And so that really opened my eyes to look for other opportunities. I ended up going to a smaller boutique merchant bank like platform, which did both a combination of MA advisory, but also capital formation assistance and working with technology startups.

founders and entrepreneurs. And that’s really opened me up to the hands-on exposure to venture capital because I was going out on their behalf and trying to lock in meetings with venture capitalists to pursue potential investment opportunities in these companies. And having spent during that experience quite a bit of time out in Silicon Valley, I just pretty much got hooked. And I said, okay, this is like something I really want to do.

longer term, more from an investment perspective. So learned a lot in investment banking and MA, learned a lot working with founders and entrepreneurs on trying to help them with their businesses and help them raise capital. But it what really became clear to me is I actually want to work on this buy side, if you will. So the investment side, the principal side of making investments in these types of companies. And that led to my next journey. And I had an opportunity to join a venture secondaries business. And then that opened up a whole nother channel

That I was not aware of, which is this world of secondaries, which really excited me because you now have this growing asset class, which is structurally illiquid. And even back then, we have this trend of these assets were staying private for longer and growing into larger and larger companies and market caps, yet not all the investors had the same timeline. And then so it was clear that there was this liquidity mismatch. And because the private markets are structurally illiquid and asymmetric.

You have opportunities to invest in these assets and sometimes buy pieces of these assets below their fair market value or below their intrinsic value. And so that introduction to venture capital growth and then secondaries really kind of think put me on the course that brought me to where I am today. In our world, you’re always following like major thematic trends, right? And so there’s this top-down approach to see what are the major trends that are driving innovation across different sectors of the economy.

And then from a bottoms up level, who are the disruptors within those different segments that are really having the greatest impact? So when you get to these later stage companies, a lot of the risk that you typically encounter when you get into venture oriented assets has been mitigated in terms of the technology. Now you can identify and you could validate that it’s real, it works versus a concept on a whiteboard. These companies we look at typically have large client bases, operating metrics, so you can perform due diligence on them.

What it really then gets to from our perspective is like the team that’s operating this business. Is this the right team that has the ability to scale the business? They don’t have the level of predictability that you may often see in companies that have been public for 10, 15, 20 years. You have this concept that we know of as innovators’ dilemma, where some of the established public market incumbents, to use them as an example, in some cases, it may actually work against their best interests for them to innovate and disrupt, because it could potentially cannibalize their existing business model.

And so what that often drives is this opportunity where you have these private companies that in stealth mode can identify those new opportunities and kind of develop them outside their purview of a public market framework. That means that more value is being accrued in advance of public market debuts. So investors need to have access points right before they miss out on the opportunity. So we’re gonna have a suite of products on the Bannek platform.

That can be made available to institutional investors, that can be made available to high net worth andor wealth-oriented, mass affluent investors, all the way down to retail investors. So that’s the idea is really to have a suite of these late stage private innovation products that give our clients access to this private innovation ecosystem.