Investing.com -- Retail investors have previously been locked out of the most significant wealth creation happening in private markets, but that dynamic is beginning to shift as public vehicles offering exposure to late-stage private companies gain traction, according to Willy Lee, a principal at Neostellar (NASDAQ: NSLR). As a result, ordinary public investors were "increasingly forced to sit on the sidelines through much of their growth," stated Lee. "With Anthropic, OpenAI and others following a similar path, many investors may not get their first opportunity to participate until these companies are already the size of major S&P 100 businesses," Lee added. Still, he said, real growth is already happening in private markets, with leading AI-native companies achieving high growth rates from significantly larger revenue bases than the enterprise software unicorns of 2021. Lee believes retail access to private markets is likely to keep growing, with more publicly traded vehicles pursuing a wider range of strategies.