Sabertooth Capital, the firm founded by former Playground Global investor Justin Ernest, has deployed nearly $500 million across 10 high-profile startups in the past year, including Anthropic, Anduril, Base Power, Databricks, PsiQuantum, and SpaceX. The firm writes checks ranging from $10 million to $275 million, taking significant equity positions in company-approved funding rounds rather than on the secondary market. In total, Sabertooth has channeled capital into companies whose combined valuations run into the hundreds of billions, offering family offices and smaller institutional investors something they typically cannot secure on their own: a seat at the cap table of the fastest-growing AI and deep tech companies. Ernest, who spent more than five years at Andy Rubin's Playground Global working on deep tech deals and fundraising, built the firm around a specific pain point he identified in the market. Family offices and smaller institutions were eager to back leading AI and defense startups, but founders and lead investors were often unwilling to add dozens of small names to their cap tables. To solve that, Sabertooth pools capital from a network of roughly 30 institutional investors through special purpose vehicles (SPVs), single-asset funds, and nominee structures, in which Sabertooth itself holds the shares on behalf of participants. Each deal functions as its own standalone fund, and the firm always invests directly in primary rounds to keep the transactions clean. That approach has helped Sabertooth stand out in a market that family office investors describe as murky. Benjamin Wagner, chief investment officer for a family office managing the wealth of 50 individuals, said he tried to invest directly in PsiQuantum, the quantum computing startup most recently valued at $7 billion, only to have the company's chief financial officer suggest he route the money through Sabertooth instead. "Justin is authentically an investor," Wagner said. "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." Ernest said he deliberately chose not to launch a traditional venture fund, a process he estimates would have taken 12 to 18 months and required him to raise capital before he could prove he could source and close deals. Instead, he used relationships built