Calvin Cooper, co-founder and chief operating officer of Neurometric, previously helped widen access to real estate investing and is now applying the same argument to private technology markets and AI infrastructure.

For Calvin Cooper, the odds facing an ordinary investor can be explained with a lottery ticket.

A person may understand the potential value of a private company, recognize an important technology trend, and have money available to invest. Yet none of that means they will receive the opportunity. Entry into many private investments still depends on wealth, accreditation status, professional networks, and access to tightly controlled deals.

The result, in Cooper’s framing, resembles a lottery in which most people cannot even buy a ticket.

That argument has followed him across two industries. Cooper first addressed exclusion through Rhove, a financial technology company focused on making real estate investment available to a broader group of people. He is now applying a similar thesis to private technology markets, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and the risks created when capital and computing resources remain concentrated among a small number of participants.

A First Attempt Through Real Estate

Cooper co-founded Rhove around a straightforward concern. Real estate has historically served as a source of wealth for property owners, but participation often requires substantial savings, financing, and the ability to purchase an entire asset.

Rhove pursued real estate democratization by developing ways to increase exposure to the asset class. Cooper led the company as chief executive through its acquisition, which closed ahead of the acquiring company’s Nasdaq direct listing.

That experience gave Cooper more than a successful exit. It provided a practical education in what happens when a company attempts to widen access within a regulated financial system.

Cooper had to work through the operational, legal, and market challenges involved in presenting an appreciating asset to people who had traditionally been excluded from owning it. Real estate offered a relatively visible starting point. Properties could be identified, local markets studied, and income models examined.

Private technology investments present a harder version of the same problem.

The Market Behind the Locked Door

Much of the growth of technology companies occurs before they enter public markets. By the time shares become available on a public exchange, early investors may have already captured years of appreciation.

Cooper argues that this structure limits retail investor access to some of the economy’s most consequential companies. Ordinary investors may see which technologies are attracting capital, but they often cannot participate on the same terms as venture funds, institutions, accredited investors, or well-connected individuals.

The issue therefore extends beyond personal investment choices. It concerns who receives access to capital, who can build wealth from early-stage growth, and who remains outside the room as ownership becomes concentrated.

Cooper’s work as an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University helped sharpen that perspective. Teaching entrepreneurship and venture finance meant explaining how investment systems function. Building Rhove meant confronting the points where those systems restrict participation.

His Pathways to Capital research for the Milken Institute furthered the question by examining the channels through which businesses and investors access funding. Together, those experiences support his view that exclusion is structural rather than accidental.

Why AI Infrastructure Raises the Stakes

The same concern now appears in Cooper’s work connected to Neurometric. Artificial intelligence depends on infrastructure that is expensive to build, operate, and access. Computing capacity, cloud services, energy, data systems, and specialized vendors can become concentrated in the hands of a limited number of providers.

That concentration creates two related problems. Investors may struggle to invest in the private companies building critical AI systems, while companies that use those systems may become dependent on a narrow group of vendors.

Neurometric’s positioning around vendor concentration connects Cooper’s long-running access argument with operational risk. When funding, ownership, and infrastructure converge in a small circle, market concentration can influence who builds AI, who profits from it, and which organizations control the resources required to compete.

For investors, the opacity of private markets makes those relationships difficult to evaluate. Private-company information is less standardized, opportunities are distributed unevenly, and the most attractive deals may never reach the general public.

Cooper’s challenge is to carry a familiar principle into this less transparent setting. Rhove addressed access to physical property. Cooper’s current work asks how similar barriers operate when the assets include private technology companies and the infrastructure beneath modern AI.

A Mission That Outlasted One Company

Cooper’s career has spanned classrooms, research, corporate leadership, company-building, and director roles at Pilot Wave Holdings, but the central question has remained consistent. Why should access to appreciating assets depend so heavily on existing capital and connections?

His planned longer-form work will continue developing the case for broader private-market participation while examining how AI infrastructure ownership affects competition. The goal is not to suggest that every investor should enter every deal. It is to challenge a system in which many people are denied the chance to consider those deals at all.

The lottery ticket analogy captures that distinction. Risk is an unavoidable part of investing. Exclusion from the ticket window is a separate choice built into the market’s structure.

After Rhove, Cooper, who writes publicly about capital access and AI, knows that opening a gated asset class requires more than an argument. It requires tools, policy awareness, operational discipline, and a model that can function within financial rules. His second attempt begins with that experience, posing the same question to a larger, less visible market.