June mARKet Update Webinar Summary

Moderated by Client Portfolio Manager Grant Banko, ARK’s June Market Update webinar opened with a macroeconomic overview by Cathie Wood, ARK’s Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer. The broader discussion then turned to commodity prices and housing market dynamics, the ARK Venture Fund’s milestone growth, SpaceX’s positioning within the venture portfolio, the Tesla-SpaceX merger thesis, space-based data centers, foundation model companies approaching public markets, the profitability timeline for autonomous systems and humanoid robots, and the multiomics investment landscape.  View the full webinar [HERE]  

How do you see commodity prices impacting the housing market’s recovery path?

Cathie Wood, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer, described the housing market as being in a depression and argued that commodity prices are not the primary obstacle to its recovery. She explained that while prices have risen—driven in part by inventory hoarding in China amid ongoing geopolitical disruptions, including the Iran war and constraints on the Straits of Hormuz—manufacturers and home builders are absorbing those cost increases rather than passing them through to consumers. Consumer goods companies have responded by increasing productivity, which has preserved margins while limiting inflationary pass-through to final goods. 

Cathie pointed to interest rates as the central lever for a housing rebound. She noted that newly appointed Chair of the Federal Reserve Kevin Warsh is closely tracking real-time inflation metrics—including blockchain-based measures like Trueflation, which has declined to ~1.8% on a headline basis and ~1.3% at the core—and that ARK expects him to lower rates as inflation surprises to the downside in the second half of the year. With high inventories of new homes and sustained affordability pressure, Cathie argued that the path to housing recovery runs through lower interest rates, not commodity price relief. 

Why is the ARK Venture Fund hitting $1 Billion an important milestone, and what does that represent to broader adoption of private equity for retail investors?

Chase Prather, Research Associate, Venture Capital, described the $1 billion milestone as a validation of the original thesis behind the ARK Venture Fund: that retail investors deserve access to private companies at a time when the most significant value creation increasingly occurs before a company goes public. Chase noted that private companies are remaining private far longer than in prior decades, leaving a meaningful share of investment upside in markets that historically have been accessible only to institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals. 

Chase highlighted that tens of thousands of retail investors have now gained exposure through the ARK Venture Fund, reflecting genuine democratization of private equity and confirming that demand for that access is real. 

How does the Fund think about its SpaceX position relative to the rest of the ARK Venture Fund portfolio, especially with it becoming a public name?

Cathie Wood discussed ARK’s approach to managing SpaceX as it transitions from a private to a public classification. She explained that the Venture Fund targets an allocation of approximately 75 to 80 percent private and 20 to 25 percent public, and that SpaceX’s entry into public markets now allows ARK’s exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to gain meaningful exposure alongside the venture position. Cathie noted that ARK’s high conviction in SpaceX makes it difficult to reduce the holding materially, and the fund’s evergreen structure provides the flexibility to carry SpaceX within the public sleeve while continuing to prioritize private companies as the core of the portfolio. 

Cathie described SpaceX as perhaps the clearest real-world example of technological convergence in ARK’s universe—spanning launch infrastructure, satellite networks, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced manufacturing—and argued that no other company better illustrates the exponential growth potential that convergence can unlock. 

When do you plan on releasing your updated SpaceX model? Do you realistically see a SpaceX and Tesla merger happening? If so, when?

Tasha Keeney, CFA, Director of Research, Autonomous Technology & Robotics, noted that ARK has already published a number of live research updates on SpaceX—available on ARK’s YouTube channel and X feeds—and encouraged investors to watch for continued updates as the research develops. On the question of a Tesla-SpaceX merger, Tasha described it as something that appears likely to occur within approximately the next couple of years, consistent with what ARK has said publicly. 

Tasha framed the merger thesis around the convergence of technology platforms. The two companies are already collaborating on manufacturing through the Terrafab project, with research beginning at Tesla before scaling to SpaceX. She highlighted AI as a powerful enabling layer across both organizations—encompassing manufacturing design, semiconductor expertise, and robotics development. Looking further out, she pointed to humanoid robots as a potential deployment asset for Mars operations and satellite launches from the moon, where the minimal atmosphere eliminates the need for rockets. This intersection of platforms, Tasha noted, makes the potential combination one of the most compelling convergence examples ARK is tracking in real time. 

Curious about the timeline for space-based data centers—is 2026 the year we see production?

Daniel Maguire, ACA, Research Analyst, Autonomous Technology & Robotics, described space-based data centers as a technology that has already moved beyond theory and into initial testing. In 2025, a private company called StarCloud launched an NVIDIA H100 graphics processing unit (GPU) into orbit and trained a basic large language model. Google has also published a research paper—"Project Suncatcher”— targeting a two-satellite demonstration in 2027, though Daniel characterized these efforts as demonstrations rather than commercial deployments. 

Daniel pointed to SpaceX as the company best positioned to commercialize orbital data centers at scale. According to its S-1 filing, SpaceX is targeting the launch of its first AI satellite in 2028, with that timeline closely tied to the development of Starship. The version 3 ship, launched on flight test 12, is the first Starship iteration designed to support AI satellite commercialization—and without a mature Starship program, orbital data centers are not economically viable. Daniel encouraged investors to track Starship development milestones as the leading indicator for this opportunity. 

How does ARK’s research team think about evaluating foundation model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI as they move toward the public markets?

Frank Downing, Director of Research, AI and Cloud, noted that this is an especially significant moment for AI investment, with both OpenAI and Anthropic having confidentially filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for public listings—following SpaceX’s own recent entry into public markets. He described OpenAI and Anthropic as setting the frontier standard in model training, with Google and xAI rounding out the top four, while emphasizing that the product most relevant to investors is no longer just the model. It is the AI agent. 

Frank pointed to the pace of Anthropic’s growth as evidence that AI agents represent a fundamentally new software category, pulling from a substantially larger addressable market than traditional enterprise software. Anthropic entered the year at ~$9 billion in annualized revenue and has since crossed $47 billion in run rate—adding nearly as much revenue in roughly six months as Salesforce accumulated over 25 years as a pure-play software company. He framed AI agents as digital knowledge workers and estimated the total addressable market at ~$30 trillion in annual wages across one billion global knowledge workers. Frank described both companies as monetizing across consumer applications, enterprise deployments, and third-party developer platforms, and expressed optimism that they could become significant positions in ARK’s ETFs if they proceed with their public listings. 

When does autonomy and robotics start the S-curve and reach profitability? 2027-2029 S-curve, 2028-2030 profitability?

Daniel Maguire outlined separate trajectories for robotaxis and humanoid robots, characterizing each as being at a distinct stage of the adoption curve. For robotaxis, he argued that the “all at once” stage is effectively underway. Waymo is completing over 500,000 driverless rides per week and targeting one million by year-end; Tesla has gone fully driverless in Austin; and internationally, players including Baidu’s Apollo Go, Pony AI, and WeRide have already reported unit economic breakeven in certain markets, demonstrating that profitability at the unit level has been achieved in real deployments. 

For humanoid robots, Daniel described the technology as earlier in the cycle, with data collection and teleoperation identified as the primary bottleneck to widespread autonomous rollout. Companies are building internal research and development (R&D) environments to train robots through teleoperation before releasing autonomous solutions. Figure AI recently demonstrated eight consecutive days of continuous autonomous pick-and-place operations in its facilities, evidence that capability is emerging. ARK’s research suggests that humanoid robots will reach human-level proficiency around 2028, at which point Daniel expects the technology to enter the same rapid scaling dynamic that robotaxis are experiencing today. 

You have had a large allocation to healthcare in ARKK which has not performed well. What do you think will catalyze a turn in multiomics stock performance?

Ovid Amadi, PhD, Multiomics Portfolio Manager and Director of Research, acknowledged the historical underperformance of healthcare within ARKK while noting that year-to-date and over the past year, multiomics names have been meaningful contributors to portfolio performance. He attributed the improvement to a combination of strong clinical data, new AI-driven business models, improved commercial execution, a more favorable macro and regulatory environment, and a return of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity in biotech at a pace not seen since pre-pandemic. 

Ovid highlighted several holdings where ARK sees near-term catalysts. Tempus continues to grow its data and oncology testing businesses at 25- 30% annually, with its molecular dataset positioned as a durable competitive advantage for clinical decision support. Twist is in the early stages of a business transformation toward AI-based drug discovery, drawing interest from biotechs, large pharma, and technology companies. CRISPR Therapeutics has approximately five clinical readouts expected in the second half of 2026 that will shape the pipeline entering 2027, alongside continued patient volume ramp for Casgevy—its gene-editing treatment for sickle cell disease, developed in partnership with Vertex. Intellia Therapeutics recently reported strong Phase 3 data and expects to file its gene-editing treatment for hereditary angioedema later this year, with approval and launch anticipated in 2027. 

Cathie Wood added that ARK views healthcare as the most profound application of AI across any of its investment themes—spanning disease cure, earlier diagnosis particularly in cancer, and a meaningful reduction in the time and cost of drug discovery and development. She attributed part of the sector’s long-running underperformance to structural siloes between healthcare and technology research communities. As those boundaries erode, she argued, companies harnessing the convergence of AI and biology are generating growth rates that neither healthcare nor technology analysts are accustomed to evaluating. That truth, in her view, ultimately will win out. 

Conclusion:

The June webinar reinforced ARK’s central conviction that we are entering a period in which technological convergence is outpacing traditional market frameworks. From housing and inflation dynamics to robotaxi deployments reaching critical mass, from orbital data centers approaching commercialization to AI agents redefining the scope of knowledge work, each topic surfaced in June reflects the same underlying dynamic: declining costs, expanding data flywheels, and platform capabilities compounding across industries simultaneously. The ARK Venture Fund crossing $1 billion is not only a business milestone; instead, it reflects growing recognition among retail investors that value creation is shifting earlier and deeper into private markets, well beyond the reach of conventional portfolios. At ARK, we remain focused on tracking and holding the convergences the market can see directionally but is still dramatically underestimating in magnitude. 

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