Cathie Wood Opens the Velvet Rope: ARK Invest’s Push Into Retail Venture Capital Is a Bet on Democratization — and on Herself

Cathie Wood Opens the Velvet Rope: ARK Invest’s Push Into Retail Venture Capital Is a Bet on Democratization — and on Herself

For most of the history of venture capital, the deal was simple and exclusionary: wealthy individuals and institutional investors got access to the fastest-growing private companies on earth, and everyone else waited for the IPO. Cathie Wood wants to change that. And she’s putting ARK Invest’s brand — still magnetic despite a bruising post-2021 drawdown — squarely behind the effort. ARK Invest, the firm Wood founded in 2014 and built into one of…