Everyone Watches the Headline IPO. The Money Was Made Before It

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PRE-IPO SPOTLIGHT · TICKR NEWS · APRIL 2026

The Pre-IPO Smartphone Company Deloitte Ranked #1 in North America

Mode Mobile has built a 490-million-user ecosystem, generated $115M+ in lifetime revenue, and posted $11.8M in EBITDA. With a Nasdaq ticker reserved and an IPO targeted within 18 months, their Series A may be the last chance to invest at $0.52.

32,481% 3-Yr Revenue Growth	$115M+ Lifetime Revenue
490M+ Total Users	$71.7M+ Capital Raised

It’s rare for a pre-IPO company to check every box institutional investors look for — explosive growth, profitability, massive user base, brand-name backers, and a clear path to public markets.

Mode Mobile appears to be doing exactly that.

The Chicago-based smartphone technology company has developed EarnOS — a proprietary platform that transforms ordinary smartphones into what the company calls ‘EarnPhones’: devices that compensate users for everyday activities like listening to music, playing games, shopping, and tracking fitness.

“Just like Uber turned cars into cash and Airbnb transformed spare rooms into revenue, Mode Mobile turns everyday smartphones into EarnPhones that literally pay you back.”
— Kevin Harrington, Original Shark Tank Investor

The financial picture is equally compelling. The company reported $11.8 million in pro-forma EBITDA for 2025 — not a projection, but an actual result. Revenue is projected at $103M in 2026 and $200M in 2027.

Hardware is sold out at Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and Target. 2 million+ five-star reviews on Google Play. Active in 170+ countries.

With the Nasdaq ticker $MODE now reserved and 59,095+ investors already committed across two sold-out rounds, access to $0.52 shares may not remain available indefinitely.

METRIC	2025 ACTUAL	2026 PROJ.	2027 PROJ.
Revenue	$39.5M	$103M	$200M
EBITDA	$11.8M	$35M	$78M

EDITOR’S NOTE: Mode’s prior two rounds sold out entirely. With 59,095+ investors committed and a defined path toward a potential IPO, access to $0.52 shares may not remain available indefinitely.

SERIES A · REG A+ SEC-QUALIFIED · $0.52/SHARE · CLOSES soon

$1,000 minimum · Up to 20% bonus shares · No accreditation required

INVEST AT $0.52/SHARE →

P.S. The two previous rounds sold out. $0.52 closes soon.

Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering. Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur. The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period. Pro forma revenue and EBITDA, includes full year numbers of the businesses acquired throughout 2025.

⏱ The Quick Read

• SpaceX listed at $1.77T and has already run to ~$2.53T. By the time a name is a headline, the cheap entry is long gone — the edge lives before the bell.

• A handful of companies are still raising at $0.52–$2.50 a share with real revenue, real users, and reserved tickers — the part of the cycle the public market never sees.

• The biggest AI deal ever signed runs on one thing nobody’s pricing: permanent power. The real bottleneck isn’t chips — it’s megawatts.

• One thread under all three: the headline is the exit, not the entry. See the pre-IPO profit story (AD)

Everyone Watches The Headline IPO. The Money Was Made Before It.

SpaceX came public this month at a valuation near $1.77 trillion — the largest listing in history — and has already run to roughly $2.53 trillion in the weeks since. The largest listing ever, and a number that reset what the market even calls “big.” The headlines wrote themselves. But underneath the confetti sits an uncomfortable truth: by the time a company rings the bell, the part of the return that changed lives has already happened — in private, at prices the public market never got to touch.

We’ve said it before and this cycle keeps proving it: the edge isn’t in the famous ticker, it’s in the timing. Coinbase was marked around $143 million in a private round and listed at roughly $85 billion. Every name people now call “obvious” — the asymmetry was spent before the IPO, by the investors early enough to still feel uncertain. The crowd buys the certainty. The early money bought the doubt.

What this means for your money: the IPO you read about is the exit for early investors, not the entry for you. If the only prices you ever see are public ones, you’re structurally late — not wrong, just arriving after the re-rating.

The Gap Between Where You Buy In And Where It Lists

Put the two worlds side by side and the math stops being abstract. On one end sit pre-IPO rounds still open to ordinary investors at a few dollars a share or less. On the other end sit the public valuations those same kinds of companies command once they list. The distance between those two points is the entire pre-IPO opportunity — and it closes for good the day a stock starts trading.

Where You Buy In vs Where It Lists — Deals Catchers data snapshot

This is the lens that matters for the names in this issue. Not “is it famous” — it isn’t, yet — but “is the growth real, and is the entry price still early.” A company posting actual EBITDA, hard user numbers, and a reserved Nasdaq ticker while still raising at pennies on the share is a fundamentally different proposition from a story stock priced for a future that may never arrive. One is early. The other is just expensive.

The risk is real and worth saying plainly: pre-IPO investments are illiquid, speculative, and can go to zero. There’s no public market to sell into and no guarantee an IPO ever happens. But that’s precisely why the entry price is low — you’re being compensated for taking the risk the crowd won’t take until it’s safe and expensive. The discipline is telling a genuinely early company apart from a slick pitch wearing the same clothes.

RYSE is a second example of the same pattern — a pre-IPO company explicitly framing itself as the early-access SpaceX retail never got, already on shelves and already re-rating before any public listing.

Why “Just Wait For The IPO” Is The Expensive Choice

The instinct to wait feels prudent. Let the company prove itself, let it list, buy it on the open market where everything is liquid and transparent. But that instinct quietly hands away the only edge an individual investor ever really has: time. The public market is efficient precisely because everyone can see it. By the time you can buy a name on your brokerage app, thousands of analysts have modeled it, institutions have positioned in it, and the price reflects all of that work. The discount for being early is gone — you paid it to the people who didn’t wait.

None of this argues for recklessness. It argues for a small, deliberate sleeve of capital aimed at being early — sized so that several of these bets can fail completely without denting your financial life, because some of them will. That’s not a contradiction of caution; it’s what real caution looks like in a portfolio that wants asymmetric upside. The careful investor isn’t the one who avoids early-stage entirely. It’s the one who decides in advance exactly how much they’re willing to lose for the chance to be early — and never a dollar more.

The Part Nobody Prices: What Keeps The AI Running

Here’s the thread the headline IPOs miss entirely. The most valuable companies on earth are racing to build AI — and that race runs on something far less glamorous than chips. Hyperscalers have committed roughly $750 billion in capital expenditure for 2026, and the binding constraint increasingly isn’t silicon. It’s electricity. Data centers need permanent, reliable power on a scale the grid wasn’t built for, and the companies that can deliver it sit one quiet layer beneath the famous names.

The Bill To Keep AI Running — Deals Catchers data snapshot

The economics are staggering when you trace them. A single flagship compute contract can run into the billions per month — tens of billions over its life — and every dollar of it depends on the machines staying powered. Software can’t fix a megawatt shortfall. Chips don’t run without it. The smart-money question isn’t “which AI model wins,” it’s “what does every model physically depend on” — and who supplies it.

That’s the same logic as the pre-IPO gap, pointed at a different target. The asymmetry rarely lives in the name everyone already owns. It lives one layer down, in the supplier or the infrastructure the giant can’t run without — the part of the story the headline never mentions because it isn’t exciting until it’s missing.

History is unkind to investors who only ever buy the obvious. The money in the railroad era wasn’t only in the railroads — it was in the steel and the land beneath the tracks. The money in the internet boom wasn’t only in the websites — it was in the fiber and the servers. Every platform shift rewards the people who ask the boring question: what does all of this physically require, and who already supplies it? AI is a platform shift the size of either — and right now the boring question points straight at power.

A Pattern That Keeps Repeating — If You Know Where To Look

Look back at almost every name people now treat as an obvious win, and the same shape appears. A company grows quietly in private for years, raising at prices that sound almost too small to matter. The public ignores it because it isn’t on a screen yet. Then it lists, the story goes mainstream, and the valuation multiplies overnight — rewarding the handful who showed up while it was still uncomfortable and unproven-looking.

The mechanics aren’t magic. A private company raising capital has to offer a price low enough to compensate investors for illiquidity and risk. A public company — trading freely, with analysts and index funds and momentum behind it — gets priced for optimism. The journey between those two states, from “why would anyone buy this” to “everyone owns this,” is where the outsized returns are manufactured. And it happens almost entirely out of public view.

That’s the opportunity and the trap in one. The opportunity: these rounds are, for now, open to ordinary investors under Reg A+ rules — no accreditation required, minimums in the hundreds or low thousands. The trap: that same access makes it easy to confuse a genuine early-stage company with a slick pitch wearing identical clothes. Democratized access democratized the downside too — which is exactly why discipline, not enthusiasm, is the edge.

The Discipline: Early Is Not The Same As Reckless

None of this is permission to chase every shiny pitch that lands in your inbox — and plenty will. The whole game is telling apart two things that look identical from the outside: a company that’s early because it’s unproven, and one that’s early because it simply hasn’t listed yet. The first is a lottery ticket. The second is a window.

How To Tell Them Apart

Real numbers, not just a story. Actual revenue, real users, audited EBITDA — not a deck full of projections.

A credible path to liquidity. A reserved ticker and a stated IPO timeline beat a vague “someday.”

Size it as speculation. Early-stage belongs in the small, can-lose-it sleeve of a portfolio — never the core.

Do that, and pre-IPO stops being a gamble and becomes what it’s supposed to be: a calculated bet on being early, made with money you’ve consciously set aside to be early with. The people who built real wealth from these names weren’t braver than you. They were earlier — and disciplined about how much they risked to be there. Invert the question: not “how much could this make me,” but “how much can I lose entirely without it changing my life.” That answer is your position size.

And hold the same skepticism toward the urgency. “Closing soon” and “last chance at this price” are real sometimes and pure theater other times — the discipline is to let the fundamentals, not the countdown, decide whether you’re in. A genuinely good early-stage company is still a good company next week. If the only reason to act today is that someone told you the window slams shut tonight, that’s not analysis, it’s pressure — and pressure is the most expensive thing you can let into an investment decision.

The Watchlist

Ticker	The trend right now
SPCX	Up to ~$2.53T from a $1.77T IPO in weeks — the benchmark for how far private-to-public valuations stretch.
NVDA	~$207, off ~7% in two weeks — still the AI bellwether, but carrying the most expectation.
VST	Power names in focus as the market wakes up to AI’s electricity bill — the unglamorous bottleneck.
COIN	IPO’d at $85B in 2021 after a $143M private mark — the textbook private-to-public gap.

The Bottom Line

Two forces defined this week. A record IPO that reminded everyone how far valuations travel between the private round and the public bell — and an AI build-out whose real bottleneck turned out to be power, not chips. Put together, they point at the same conclusion: where and when you buy in matters more than whatever’s leading the news.

We’ve held one thesis through every version of this. The crowd shows up after the story is safe, and safe is just another word for expensive. The asymmetry — the kind that actually changes a portfolio — lives in the uncomfortable space before the headline: in the names still raising at pennies, and in the unglamorous infrastructure the giants quietly depend on.

So the question for your accounts isn’t “what’s the next hot IPO.” It’s “am I only ever seeing prices after the easy money is gone — and do I understand what the whole thing actually runs on.” If the answer makes you uncomfortable, that’s the thing to address this week, calmly and in the right size.

Forget the hot picks — protect what you’ve already built. The repositioning that matters is happening quietly, done by people who buy before the crowd and look one layer beneath the headline. Because the best trade you’ll ever make is the loss you never took.

— Lee