SEC brings case over $74M in pre-IPO sales to more than 800 investors

SEC brings case over $74M in pre-IPO sales to more than 800 investors

2 min läsning•19 aug. 2026•
Liu Wei
Liu Wei

The SEC has brought a case against Long Island-based The Spaventa Group, alleging that pre-IPO sales raised more than $74 million, first reported by Fortune. The case puts the scale in stark terms: over 800 people invested, including over 100 retirees, and the SEC alleges a 46% average premium over what Spaventa’s companies paid for the positions.

The SEC complaint, filed Friday in the Southern District of New York, alleges that former broker Andrew Spaventa and his firm deployed more than 100 agents to make thousands of calls. The agents allegedly marketed shares in private companies including Anduril, Anthropic, Perplexity and SpaceX before its IPO, with the money raised for 11 private funds run from offices on Long Island and New Jersey.

Most buyers were retail investors. More than 650 invested $100,000 or less, while over 100 were retirees, according to the SEC’s allegations. The SEC alleges that investors paid 46% more on average than Spaventa’s own companies paid to get the positions, with the premium reaching 91% in some cases.

The central tension is a promise that investors would avoid unnecessary fees alongside alleged markups large enough to average 46%. The scale also exceeds the SEC’s case this year against Giovanni Pennetta, who was accused of misappropriating $10 million in investor funds while selling fraudulent shares in companies including Anduril; Pennetta later pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud.

The allegations emerged amid an AI-fueled run-up in private markets and a massive, unregulated secondary market. Spaventa denied the SEC’s claims when reached by phone.

Persona AI picks shipyard welding for its humanoid robot

Persona AI is focusing its humanoid robot on shipyard welding as its first task, first reported by Spectrum. The company sees a shortage of skilled workers and a need for hundreds of kilometers of linear welds per ship, while the labor constraints at its partnerships leave robots as a possible option when additional skilled labor does not exist.

A narrower entry point

Persona did not see economic viability in baseline unskilled human labor and instead formed its thesis around skilled trades and tool use. Its humanoid is intended to use the same handheld tools as humans, beginning with long, linear welds that are relatively uncomplicated.

Metal must melt before the weld advances, so the task’s top speed is an easily manageable centimeter per second. High-quality welds require millimeter-scale repeated motions that robots excel at over long periods, while humans tend to get tired or bored.

A capacity case for shipyards

Persona has two public partnerships: HD Hyundai, the world’s largest shipbuilder, and POSCO, the third-largest steel producer in the world; both are in Korea. The company declined to provide detail, but Radford said it is broadly interested in customers able to support hundreds of robots per location.

Shipyards also make a case for legs. Open-air yards can be a couple hundred meters long, with horizontal and vertical spars workers have to step over, and work can occur on the ground, overhead and through portholes. After considering four legs or more, Persona determined that two legs would be least disruptive to existing shipyard rhythms.

The commercial case is added capacity, not replacing humans. Persona says its current partnerships have significant backlogs and are labor-constrained, so the robots are meant to help customers build more ships; even a robot more expensive than a human could be valuable if it unlocked additional revenue.

The narrow task and the capacity argument put technical fit and labor scarcity in the same business case.

Shipyard welding is attractive partly because of a deficit of skilled, highly paid workers and taxing physical labor. Some safety concerns around bipedal robots are lessened because shipyard workers are trained to work around potentially dangerous industrial equipment, and Persona is less sensitive to competitive pricing because no other company is pursuing the use case.

Shipbuilding is a beachhead for grinding, painting and other fabrication. Expanding from welding will require tens of thousands of hours of expert demonstration data, high-fidelity simulations and real-world testing, and Persona still has to prove that its idea for an economically viable robotics company can be realized.

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