Hello there,
Welcome to the best of the Altea Community.
Let’s go 🚀
Table of Contents
👋 New Members
Welcome to the 121 new members since last week 👋
A few notable members..
⚾ Max Eisenberg spent a decade on the business side of sports and his passion is athlete earnings as an untapped asset class. He’s currently raising Front Row Capital Baseball Fund 1, a fund that invests in the future MLB earnings of top-ranked minor league prospects.
He’s also helping build Finlete, a platform we’ve featured that brings similar deal flow to non-accredited investors.
🤝 Nick Merlo helps real estate investors navigate 1031 exchanges through Delaware Statutory Trusts (DSTs). He’s looking to connect with other real estate professionals, investors, attorneys, CPAs, and wealth advisors.
💬 New WhatsApp Community Space
Altea now has a WhatsApp community
We’ve just launched a dedicated WhatsApp Community for Altea — a faster, more direct way to connect with the team and with each other, in real time.
This is the casual, real-time layer of the community.
Quick chats, GIFs, questions, memes, low-key chats.
Circle remains the home base for the structured stuff: deal docs, courses, and longer-form discussion.
You can also join via QR code:
Note: We’re deprecating the old Chat space in Circle. WhatsApp is just a far better tool for this.
🎓 New Course
How to Not Get Scammed in Litigation Finance
You may have heard that two big litigation finance firms recently got into trouble: Fenchurch Legal, and Manhattan ST Notes.
A number of Altea members are at risk of losing all or most of their capital (including our CEO Stefan).
When that happens, you can put your tail between your legs, quietly eat the loss, and move on.
But we’re running an alternative investing and education platform here. What we actually want is to prevent people from getting into bad deals in the first place.
So instead of sulking, we did two things:
- We got organized, creating recovery groups for affected investors
- We built a course.
Our first film course got great feedback, so we’re turning this into a series. Litigation finance is chapter two.
What you’ll learn
This course has five modules:
- Module 1: What litigation finance actually is. The real structural opportunity, and the spectrum of models from outcome-dependent to receivables-based
- Module 2: How to understand the capital structure. How an SPV really works, and what “ringfenced” really means versus what it’s made to sound like.
- Module 3: Things that look like protection but aren’t. Security trustees, named insurers, quarterly coupons, and spotless track records — and the specific conditions under which each one fails you.
- Module 4: Red flags in the offering documents. How to actually read what you’re given: the accounts, the disclosures, the regulatory framework, and the questions that separate risky platforms from sound ones.
- Module 5: What happens when it goes wrong. How administration actually works, what your options are at each stage, the coordination problem nobody warns you about, and the exact steps to take in the first 48 hours.
By the end, you’ll have a complete due diligence framework you can apply to any litigation finance opportunity that crosses your desk.
There’s a quiz at the end.
Estimated time to complete the course: 30 minutes.
What you get for completing
After taking this course and passing the quiz at the end, you get:
- An invitation to participate in litigation finance opportunities vetted through this exact framework
- Confidence in your ability to evaluate any litigation finance deal on its actual merits
- +100 points in our Rewards Program 🏆
This course was reviewed and edited by domain experts within the Altea community.
A big thanks to Louis Morin, Bryan Cooley, Travis Mitchell, Mandar Mirashi, and Rekha Holla for substantive feedback on structure, regulatory framing, underwriting practice, and case studies.
⛩️ New Whisky I Update
We have secured an exclusive Ontake Mizunara Oak Cask for the cask vertical.
This cask was never meant for public release. It had been earmarked solely for existing Ontake cask owners, but the distillery agreed to release a single cask specifically for the Alts group.
For anyone unfamiliar, Mizunara is widely regarded as the most iconic oak in Japanese whisky. It’s native to Japan and incredibly scarce, with trees often needing 150+ years before they’re usable, and only about one in ten suitable for coopering.
The result is a distinctive profile of sandalwood, incense, spice, and soft perfumes that collectors recognize instantly.
The team tried Ontake’s Mizunara spirit on their most recent visit and found it excellent. Rich, oily, aromatic, and a perfect match for the distillery’s style.
This is a meaningful upgrade to the portfolio, both for the cask’s rarity and for the strong identity Mizunara carries among collectors worldwide. Questions are always welcome, so reach out anytime.
🛡️ New Public Deal: Shield AI
For better or worse, the world is rearming. One company has become the de facto standard for autonomy software, and accredited investors can now get direct cap-table access.
The company is called Shield AI, and it’s the “brain” inside military drones and aircraft.
This enables drone missions with no pilots or remote controls — even when GPS and radio links are jammed.
Notes:
- Proven tech: Shield has been integrated by 8 of the top 25 defense prime contractors
- Growth is accelerating: Revenue is on pace to grow 80%+ this year. Targeting $1B run-rate by 2028
- Margins are shifting toward software: Licensing the autonomy stack pushes margins toward SaaS-like territory
The opportunity:
- This is a pre-IPO investment in Shield AI
- Direct cap-table access via preferred shares
- $160/share, at a ~$13.3B valuation — in line with the company’s most recent institutional round.
- The window is short: Allocation is limited and closes in about ten days.
Accredited investors only. This is not an Altea SPV.
That’s it for today!
See you next week, Wyatt & Stefan
