Last year, Justin Ernest noticed a massive gap in how venture capital was working: Family offices and smaller institutional investors were eager to invest in the fastest-growing AI companies but couldn’t get access to those cap tables. 

Having spent over five years at Playground Global investing in deep tech and helping lead fundraising, Ernest was confident his connections to both investors and founders would allow him to bridge that gap.

Instead of launching a formal VC fund, a process he says takes new managers anywhere from 12 to 18 months, Ernest used his network to secure allocations of stock in high-profile, later-stage companies. He then offers these individual deals to a group of about 30 smaller institutional investors using special purpose vehicles (SPVs), single-asset funds, and nominee structures. In the latter, his firm, Sabertooth Capital, holds shares on behalf of participating investors rather than through a traditional SPV.

Over the last 12 months, Sabertooth has invested nearly $500 million into 10 companies, including Anthropic, Anduril, Base Power, Databricks, PsiQuantum, and SpaceX. The firm treats each deal as its own separate fund, in most cases structuring it as an SPV, in which the fund’s investors buy shares in the vehicle that owns the stock.

He’s writing checks ranging from $10 million to $275 million — meaning he’s gaining significant chunks of shares — and always participating in official, company-approved funding rounds.

Sabertooth is not the only firm offering family offices an opportunity to purchase equity in individual high-profile, late-stage startups. However, Ernest quickly raised a significant amount of cash from them because, in the sometimes-shady world of small allocations and SPVs targeting family offices, he’s earned a solid reputation.

“Justin is authentically an investor,” said Benjamin Wagner, a CIO for a family office managing the wealth of 50 individuals. “He has judgment, he has expertise, he’s very technical, that really distinguishes him from other organizations that tend to, in my opinion, just trying to aggregate capital.”

When Wagner tried to invest directly in PsiQuantum, the quantum computing startup last valued at $7 billion, the company’s CFO suggested that he invest through Sabertooth.

“So, the first time I met [Ernest], I knew he was legitimate,” Wagner said. “Justin’s access is definitely different from some of these fly-by-night organizations.”

That validation is extremely important. At a time when startups like Anthropic and Anduril are cracking down on unauthorized SPVs, investing through Sabertooth gives smaller limited partners some peace of mind. They know they are entrusting their money to an investor who is directly vetted and respected by the companies themselves.

Beyond technical knowledge, the Harvard Business School graduate honed his communication skills after largely overcoming a childhood speech impediment. Ernest credits his ability to secure allocations of stock when highly coveted tech companies are raising to his wide network.

“I’ve always found that my sort of superpower is being the nucleus of my network, and I like to use that and utilize that in a very strategic way,” he told TechCrunch.

For instance, he can generally obtain investor capital for a new SPV from family offices on a tight timeline.

“I have a captive set of LPs,” he said. “I can usually make four or five or six phone calls, and I know exactly what my LPs will commit.”

Ernest told TechCrunch that for now, he wants to continue growing his business of raising funds for specific companies on behalf of his dedicated LP base. However, his ultimate goal is to eventually raise a traditional venture fund. That’s a difficult task, but he believes Sabertooth’s strong returns via these one-off SPVs to prove his track record, something investors care about most when deciding to back a new fund.

He’s on his way with that wish. Sabertooth has already had one major big return from chipmaker Groq, which was licensed and acqui-hired by Nvidia for $20 billion late last year. Next up is SpaceX’s highly anticipated IPO this Friday, along with Anthropic’s expected public listing later this year. They are poised to deliver an even greater windfall for his investors.

But SPVs don’t have the same kind of street cred as traditional VC funds. Yet Ernest remains confident that starting with them, and earning a solid rep with family offices, rather than launching an emerging venture fund and duking it out with competitors was the right strategic move. “I wanted to be in the action,” he said. “I think this will end up being one of the best vintages of our lifetime.”

Updated to reflect Sabertooth’s total capital deployed.

Google just made its budget AI subscription plan a lot more budget-friendly, bringing a price war that’s been brewing in emerging markets squarely to American consumers.

The company announced Monday that it is cutting the monthly price of Google AI Plus from $7.99 to $4.99 — while doubling the storage included at that tier, from 200 gigabytes to 400 gigabytes.

Vikas Kansal, product lead for Gemini AI subscriptions, said on X that the storage updates would roll out to users over the next several days.

Google AI Plus launched in January as the most affordable paid AI subscription in the U.S. market, aimed at individual users and students rather than enterprise customers. The new pricing makes that positioning even more explicit.

It includes a decent feature set, too, including video generation via Omni Flash; the creative studio Google Flow; and NotebookLM, Google’s AI research assistant. Users who need more — more features, higher usage limits — can step up to Google’s AI Pro or AI Ultra tiers.

But the more interesting story here isn’t about Google’s product lineup. Subscription pricing hasn’t been a key battleground among AI providers in the U.S. until now — and that shift has serious consequences for the broader market, suggests Chi-Hua Chien, co-founder and managing partner at Goodwater Capital, a consumer-focused venture firm in the Bay Area.

Chien sees Monday’s announcement as the next salvo in what he calls the commoditization era for AI infrastructure, pointing to Google’s structural advantages — vertical integration, massive distribution, the ability to bundle — as precisely the kind of force that’s likely to erode margins for purer-play AI providers over time.

The historical parallel he reaches for is instructive. “If you look at the web era, the infrastructure companies were Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Northern Telecom, Lucent, Akamai, Equinix,” he told TechCrunch. “A lot of those companies survived for a period of time but aren’t worth a lot today.” The reason, he said, is that during every big tech shift — from PC to web to mobile — the infrastructure players get “commoditized very aggressively because the end customer doesn’t think, ‘Ooh, are my bits moving on Cisco networking equipment?’ They’re just thinking, ‘How do I move my bits as cheaply as possible?’”

None of this is a surprise to the people building foundation models. They’ve always known that raw AI capability would eventually become a commodity, and that the real competition would play out at the application and distribution layer. What Chien is saying is that “eventually” is now.

“My prediction for a lot of these infrastructure companies — and when I say infrastructure, I mean an OpenAI or an Anthropic, or the backend components, energy, chips, hosting — there will be a period of time when these companies are valuable,” he said. “But over time, you will see them get increasingly commoditized.”

It’s certainly something that a bigger pool of investors will be pondering soon. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have filed confidentially to go public, and their ability to command premium valuations may soon be tested by exactly the kind of price competition Chien is describing.

That competition has been building for nearly a year in markets like India, one of the fastest-growing AI user bases in the world. OpenAI drew first blood there in August of last year, launching ChatGPT Go at roughly $4.60 a month — a fraction of its standard $20 Plus plan. Google followed in December with a sub-$5 AI Plus plan of its own for Indian users.

Monday’s announcement suggests the same logic that drove those emerging-market moves — undercut, bundle, and capture users before rivals do — has now crossed over to the U.S. market.

Anthropic, notably, hasn’t followed. Unlike OpenAI and Google, it has yet to introduce localized pricing for India or a budget tier anywhere, a move that may become harder to avoid as its rivals keep slashing prices.

Emad Dlala, a top executive at EV-maker Lucid Motors, has left the company just months after being promoted to a leading role, TechCrunch has learned.

Dlala’s exit is the first major executive departure since Lucid Motors named Silvio Napoli as its new CEO in April. Napoli joined Lucid after a career in various leadership positions at escalator and elevator maker Schindler Group and formally took over the CEO role just last week.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Lucid Motors confirmed Dlala’s departure and said the company is “transforming its organization to accelerate innovation and strengthen execution under CEO Silvio Napoli.”

As part of that transformation, Lucid Motors said that Vivek Attaluri, the company’s vice president of vehicle engineering, and Marc Solsona Palomar, its vice president of software, will now report directly to Napoli. 

“Emad Dlala has elected to leave the company to pursue other opportunities. We thank Emad for his many contributions over the years and wish him continued success in his future endeavors. Lucid remains focused on streamlining our organization and processes to fully leverage the strength of our team and will communicate further actions soon,” the company said in a statement.

Dlala declined to comment.

Dlala had been with Lucid Motors for more than a decade, making him one of the company’s longest-serving employees and executives. Over the past five years, he served as both Lucid Motors’ vice president and senior vice president overseeing the company’s powertrain team.

In November, he was elevated to a role overseeing all of “Engineering and Digital” at the same time that Lucid Motors parted ways with its long-time chief engineer Eric Bach. Bach has since sued Lucid Motors for wrongful termination — though that lawsuit was recently stayed pending arbitration, according to federal court records.

The company has been in flux in the months since. Lucid Motors laid off 12% of its workforce in February, as TechCrunch first reported. It then completed its search for a new CEO after spending a year trying to replace Peter Rawlinson, who suddenly departed in early 2025.

The departure of Dlala comes just a few months ahead of the launch of Lucid Motors’ first mass-market vehicle built on its mid-sized platform, called the Cosmos, a mid-size EV that’s supposed to start below $50,000. It would be the Saudi-owned company first real chance at delivering a more affordable, widely-adopted car.

This next-generation EV is also now a cornerstone of Lucid’s deal to provide robotaxis to Uber. Lucid Motors has agreed to develop robotaxis with autonomous vehicle company Nuro, starting with its Gravity SUV. The self-driving Gravity is supposed to hit the road in San Francisco by the end of this year.