Steven Bartlett – Entrepreneur, founder of Steven.com, host of The Diary of a CEO, and BBC Dragons’ Den investor – has officially cemented his transition from consumer tech to deep tech investing. Bartlett secured stakes in two of the most disruptive hardware companies of the 2020s: Groq and SpaceX. Both of these high-conviction bets resulted in historic financial events.
Groq: The $20 Billion Nvidia Deal (December 2025)
Bartlett’s entry into the AI hardware race began with a seven-figure investment into Groq via his fund, an AI chip startup manufacturing high-speed Language Processing Units (LPUs). Introduced to the company by music executive and investor Scooter Braun, Bartlett recognised the genius of Groq founder Jonathan Ross and the critical need for ultra-fast AI inference chips.
That bet paid off monumentally on Christmas Eve 2025. Nvidia, looking to neutralise a major threat and consolidate its dominance in the AI hardware space, executed a $20 billion deal to effectively buy Groq. Instead of a traditional corporate merger that would trigger lengthy antitrust reviews, Nvidia purchased a perpetual license to Groq’s intellectual property and absorbed Ross alongside 80% of the engineering team. This unique deal structure represented a massive liquidity event for investors like Bartlett and his funds, proving the value of backing foundational hardware over superficial AI software wrappers.
SpaceX: The Historic June 2026 IPO
While Groq represented a targeted strike in the AI wars, Bartlett’s investment in Elon Musk’s SpaceX was a massive play on the orbital economy. SpaceX had spent years dominating the commercial spaceflight industry with its reusable Falcon 9 rockets and its rapidly expanding Starlink satellite internet network.
On June 12, 2026, Bartlett’s private market play came to full fruition when SpaceX officially went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SPCX. The listing broke global records as the largest initial public offering in history, raising $75 billion. By the end of its first day of trading, SpaceX’s market capitalization surged past $3 trillion, officially cementing Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire. For investors like Bartlett who secured equity while the aerospace giant was still private, the IPO represented a significant financial event.
The Investment Thesis
- Owning the Infrastructure: Bartlett is actively ignoring fleeting software trends in favor of the physical infrastructure powering the future – AI silicon (Groq) and orbital logistics (SpaceX).
- Backing Category Kings: Both companies were undisputed technical leaders in highly capital-intensive, monopolistic markets.
- Exploiting the Private-to-Public Gap: By accessing these decacorns in the private markets, Bartlett captured the immense value appreciation that occurred right before these companies experienced their ultimate liquidity events.
As the tech ecosystem pivots toward artificial intelligence and space commercialization, Steven Bartlett’s portfolio proves that the greatest returns are found by backing the hard engineering shaping human progress.