A former Playground Global investor is using special purpose vehicles to help family offices get in on some of the most coveted late-stage tech deals of the moment. Justin Ernest, who spent more than five years at the deep tech firm working on investments and fundraising, launched Sabertooth VC last year after spotting a clear gap in the market: smaller institutional investors and family offices had serious capital to deploy but kept getting shut out of cap tables for breakout AI and defense companies. Rather than spending 12 to 18 months raising a traditional venture fund, Ernest tapped his existing relationships with both founders and limited partners, secured allocations of stock in hot startups, and packaged each deal as its own single-investment SPV for a group of roughly 30 backers. The results have been striking. In just 12 months, Sabertooth has funneled close to $400 million into 10 companies, including Anthropic, Anduril, Databricks, PsiQuantum, and SpaceX. Individual check sizes range from $10 million all the way up to $275 million, and every transaction is structured as part of an official, company-sanctioned funding round rather than a secondary side deal. PsiQuantum, the quantum computing startup most recently valued at $7 billion, was one such investment, and the company’s CFO personally pointed one outside investor toward Sabertooth rather than dealing with him directly. That kind of endorsement has helped Ernest stand out in a corner of the market that some family office executives view with suspicion. Benjamin Wagner, who serves as CIO for a family office overseeing the wealth of 50 individuals, said Ernest’s technical background and track record separate him from firms that he sees as little more than capital aggregators. “Justin is authentically an investor,” Wagner told TechCrunch. “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.” Wagner added that PsiQuantum’s finance team effectively vouched for Ernest’s legitimacy before he ever wrote a check. Sabertooth’s rise comes as several of its portfolio companies are tightening up access to their cap tables. Anthropic and Anduril in particular have been pushing back against the more opaque corners of the secondary market, which makes the official, company-approved structure of Sabertooth’s SPVs especially attractive to investors wary of getting fleeced. With AI, defense tech, and quantum computing startups continuing to command eye-popping valuations, Ernest appears to have found a durable niche: giving smaller institutional players a vetted on-ramp to the deals that have otherwise been locked behind the biggest check-writers in venture capital.