An order book for the companies you can't buy
Picture wanting to own a sliver of SpaceX before it ever rings the opening bell. Until recently, that meant phone calls, PDFs, brokers who knew brokers, and a wire transfer made mostly on faith. Noel Moldvai looked at that and saw something an engineer can't unsee: a market with no market. So he and his co-founders built Augment, a FINRA-registered Alternative Trading System where accredited investors place orders for shares of late-stage private companies the same way they'd trade a public stock.
The shorthand he uses is blunt: "the Robinhood for the private markets." Two products do the heavy lifting - a marketplace with order-book style trading, and a Collective program that slices large blocks of shares into pieces ordinary investors can actually afford. Names on the platform read like the most-wanted list of the private economy: SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe.
What makes the story worth telling is not the logos. It's that he made the unglamorous plumbing of private-market liquidity into a business that works - and then made it pay for itself faster than most startups settle on a font.
The stock he believed in and couldn't sell
Before Augment, Moldvai was a founding engineer at Rubrik, the data-security company that went public in 2024. He helped haul its on-prem technology into the cloud - and along the way collected the experience that would later define his second act. Early employees earn equity in companies they help build. Then they watch that equity sit, year after year, locked behind the absence of an exit. You can believe in the stock completely and still not be able to turn any of it into rent.
That friction is the whole idea behind Augment. Not a market opportunity spotted from a deck, but an itch felt firsthand. The same instinct that made him a useful engineer - if something is broken, take it apart and fix the mechanism - pointed straight at the most stubbornly analog corner of finance.
"Augment is the Robinhood for the private markets."
- Noel Moldvai, on the Smart Humans podcastThe crowded field he walked into would scare off most founders. Forge Global processed billions and got swept up by Charles Schwab. EquityZen landed at Morgan Stanley. Nasdaq Private Market runs its own giant pipes. Moldvai's wager was that the incumbents had built for institutions and left a glaring gap: a clean, modern, transparent venue where individual accredited investors get real price discovery instead of a quote whispered over the phone.
How Augment stacks up
Augment is the newcomer, and that's the point. It's small next to the giants - and growing on a curve that started from a standing stop in April 2024.
Figures are approximate and drawn from public reporting; volume metrics span different time windows (cumulative vs. monthly vs. lifetime) and are shown for scale, not as a like-for-like comparison.
Berkeley to a buy button
The path here is stranger than the resume suggests. Moldvai grew up between Eastern Europe - Hungarian roots, by way of the former Yugoslavia - and the Bay Area, where he finished high school as valedictorian. At UC Berkeley he studied electrical engineering and computer science, did astrophysics research on millimeter-wavelength observations, and co-founded Cal Blueprint, the student consultancy that builds software for nonprofits.
Then came Google, then Rubrik, then the patents - more than ten to his name. It's a career of showing up early: early at a company that would IPO, early to a market most people still treat as a back room. Today he runs Augment from Austin.
Metal, drums, and a Simpsons avatar
The personal details refuse to fit the fintech-CEO mold, which is exactly why they're worth keeping. He's a metalhead who plays both guitar and drums. He runs around a soccer pitch and a tennis court. His personal website greets you not with a polished headshot but with a Simpsons-style cartoon of himself - a small, deliberate refusal to take the founder genre too seriously.
His online handles tell on him a little too. The Twitter account is @noelregrets. The GitHub is noeleo. For a person building infrastructure for one of finance's most serious corners, there's a steady undercurrent of not performing seriousness - the kind of confidence that doesn't need a uniform.
In his own words
Moldvai sat down with the Smart Humans podcast to walk through how Augment works, why private markets stayed illiquid for so long, and his strategies for investing into pre-IPO companies.