The bill arrived on time. The exits did not. In 2022, Mike Hurst owned the sort of portfolio that looks comforting in a spreadsheet and awkward in a checking account: technology shares battered by the market, plus stakes in venture funds designed to remain private for years. The funds kept making capital calls. Hurst wanted to answer them. He also wanted to make new investments. What he did not want was to sell Amazon near the bottom, mortgage his house, or pretend that valuable private assets were the same thing as available cash.
This would be an unpleasant puzzle for any investor. For Hurst, it became a company. He had already spent a decade building financial plumbing for entertainment payments. Now the blockage was personal. A venture-fund position could appreciate, sit neatly on a statement, and remain almost useless as collateral. The asset was patient. The capital call was punctual. Somewhere between those two clocks, Hurst saw Turbine Finance.
The Santa Monica company lends against limited-partner and general-partner interests in venture and private-equity funds. The pitch is plain: keep the position, keep its possible upside, and borrow against it instead of accepting an early sale at a discount. Turbine is less a celebration of debt than an argument about timing. If private companies now take longer to exit, the surrounding financial infrastructure must learn to wait without becoming inert.
Firms kept coming for capital calls and new investments. I wanted to make them, but I didn't want to mortgage the house.Mike Hurst, describing the problem that led to Turbine
The first machine moved royalties
Hurst has a habit of finding money that belongs to someone but arrives through machinery built for an earlier age. In 2011, while at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he co-founded Exactuals. Entertainment payments were rich in contractual detail and poor in elegance. Studios, unions, music publishers, labels and payroll companies had to send royalties or residuals to sprawling populations of performers and rights holders. Paper checks, tax documents, identity records and inconsistent metadata made the process expensive and slow.
Exactuals built PaymentHub to register payees, aggregate payment information, distribute electronic payments and provide reporting. It later added tools for matching royalty data, including machine-learning technology for resolving who should be paid. The subject matter looked niche from a distance. Up close, it was a large financial system with people waiting at the edges.
City National Bank began working with Exactuals in 2013 and became an investor. By 2017, Exactuals had a long-term agreement involving SAG-AFTRA and its 160,000 members. In August 2018, City National acquired the company. Hurst stayed as chief executive under a multi-year contract, then moved to chairman in 2022. The terms of the sale were not disclosed, but the outcome gave Hurst both capital to invest and a sharp education in what happens after a founder becomes an allocator.
A portfolio with no convenient door
The venture market after 2022 made Hurst's private inconvenience broadly legible. Public technology valuations fell. Private-company exits slowed. Funds continued calling committed capital while distributions became scarcer. Investors who sold fund stakes in the secondary market could face legal costs, taxes, permission requirements and discounts. A sale could also mean surrendering future appreciation or access to later fund vintages.
Borrowing sounded obvious until one asked a bank to underwrite it. A limited partner does not directly own a tidy bundle of publicly quoted shares. The investor owns part of a partnership, which may own stakes in 15 or 20 private companies, each with incomplete data and no live market price. A conventional lender sees uncertainty multiplied by paperwork. A venture manager sees a portfolio it understands and has little desire to explain separately to dozens of banks.
The two clocks of venture capital
Turbine's job is to make that difficult collateral legible. It partners with venture firms, collects fund track records and underlying company information, evaluates the portfolio, and gives eligible investors a borrowing figure. The fund participates once at the platform level rather than improvising a new diligence process for every LP. Approved borrowers can use proceeds for business, commercial or investment purposes, including capital calls and new fund commitments.
The distinction matters. A secondary transaction asks, “Who will buy this position, and at what discount?” Turbine asks, “How much conservative credit can this position support?” Neither answer abolishes risk. A loan must be repaid, and a private portfolio can disappoint. But the second question creates an option where an investor previously had a choice between waiting and selling.
The repeat-founder pattern
There is a clean line between Hurst's two companies. Exactuals made complicated payments easier to route. Turbine makes difficult assets easier to finance. Both begin where an existing institution can perform the task in theory but finds the edge cases bothersome in practice. The entertaining part of finance, if such a thing may be admitted, is that the plumbing is never merely plumbing. A delayed royalty changes an artist's month. A trapped fund position can stop an investor from joining the next vintage.
Hurst also crossed the table between the two acts. He became a venture partner associated with TTV Capital, an Exactuals investor, and worked with Fin Capital and StartX companies. That experience showed him the liquidity problem from several angles: a founder searching for capital, an investor committing it, and a fund watching strong portfolio companies struggle when their backers could not recycle cash quickly enough.
His public advice has the same direct quality as the Turbine pitch. At a roundtable with MBA students at USC Marshall, Hurst told them there were “no bad outcomes” at that stage, urged them to make a decision and run with it, and reminded them that their tolerance for risk might never be higher. It is practical counsel, almost suspicious of elaborate hesitation. Turbine applies a similar temperament to a market famous for telling everyone to wait.
More doors, same room
Turbine came out of stealth in April 2025 with $21.75 million in seed and Series A equity funding. Alpha Edison and TTV Capital co-led the Series A, joined by Fin Capital, B Capital and Sozo Ventures. Silicon Valley Bank supplied a warehouse facility of up to $100 million to fund loans. The participating venture firms were also early distribution partners, offering Turbine's product to their own investor communities.
By February 2026, Hurst said Turbine had underwritten about 60 funds and had more than 160 firms in its pipeline, representing over $500 billion in assets under management. The company now reports relationships with more than 90 firms. It has also widened the aperture. LP loans address fund investors. GP lending lets managers borrow against commitments and carried-interest economics. In 2026, Turbine announced NAV loans made at the fund level, designed to finance follow-on investments after a fund has already called and deployed its original capital.
That expansion turns a personal cash-flow fix into a small family of products built around the same object: a fund position that has value but no easy door. For an LP, the loan may bridge a capital call. For a GP, it may support a commitment to a new fund. For the fund itself, NAV credit may preserve exposure to a portfolio company without creating a separate special-purpose vehicle.
By empowering alternative asset investors to access their capital on their own schedule, Turbine will unlock increased investment to high performance funds.Mike Hurst on Turbine's purpose
Patience, with optionality
Private-market credit requires restraint because the sales pitch and the risk live in the same sentence. Borrowers preserve their ownership precisely because they take on an obligation. Data science can organize uncertainty; it cannot turn every portfolio company into a winner. Turbine's invitation-only model and fund-level underwriting are therefore central, not decorative. The company is attempting to standardize a product without pretending the collateral is standard.
Hurst's larger aspiration is measured in trillions. Turbine says roughly $14 trillion sits in private-market positions worldwide, much of it inaccessible on an investor's preferred schedule. The company cannot manufacture exits. It can try to make the time before an exit less financially clumsy.
That is also the compact lesson of Hurst's career. He has not chased money in motion. He has chased money stuck between institutions, file formats, contractual rights and calendars. The first time, the recipients were performers and rights holders waiting on entertainment payments. The second time, one of the waiting investors was Hurst himself. The annoyance became an observation; the observation became underwriting; the underwriting became Turbine.
Venture capital still asks for patience. Hurst is not trying to shorten the life of a good investment. He is trying to make the waiting room useful.