Have you heard of Reg A? Neither had Austin Allison — until he used it to fund Pacaso, a real estate startup for luxury vacation homes.
Allison, Pacaso’s cofounder and CEO, started the company with Spencer Rascoff. They were both veterans of the real estate and consumer technology industries when they launched Pacaso in 2020.
Pacaso is a platform for fractional ownership of luxury vacation homes. The company facilitates the sale of properties in vacation destinations like Jackson Hole, Tuscany, and Napa, which are acquired through property-specific LLCs. Unlike timeshares, which allow multiple users the right to use a property for a set time each year, Pacaso allows clients to share equity in their properties.
The company reached a $1 billion valuation just five months after launch, and at the time, it was the fastest startup in the US to hit unicorn status. Its current valuation is just short of $1 billion, representatives for the company told Business Insider.
The pair first funded Pacaso the traditional way, raising nearly $220 million over the course of four years from investors like SoftBank, Fifth Wall, Greycroft, and Maveron. By 2024, they began considering other options because, Allison said, venture capital suddenly felt limited.
“Traditional VC rounds put one or two investors on your cap table,” Allison told Business Insider.
The company wanted more eyeballs on its platform.
They came across Reg A, a securities exemption that lets startups raise up to $75 million in a 12-month period through a form of equity crowdfunding.
It functions like a mini-IPO, allowing companies to raise money from both accredited and non-accredited investors — unlike Regulation D, which limits participation to accredited investors — while avoiding many of the regulatory hurdles associated with a full public offering.
Allison said that Reg A presented “a unique way to raise capital while simultaneously expanding brand awareness and customer acquisition.”
“It’s a ‘two birds with one stone’ approach,” he added.
Pacaso’s team spent about six months preparing before officially launching their Reg A campaign, which included making a specialized pitch deck.
Unlike a standard pitch deck designed for investors, this needed to appeal to the masses. “We wanted to make sure our deck was very compliant, very public-facing, and accurate,” Tom Mulholland, Pacaso’s senior director of strategic initiatives and capital deployment, told Business Insider.
The campaign was open between October 1, 2024, and September 18, 2025. During that time, the company prepared four or five different versions of its deck. Mulholland said the team drafted it in large part from the top questions they received from potential investors.
The company distributed the deck on its website. It also hosted investor webinars — which drew thousands of viewers over the course of the raise — where Pacaso’s CEO, CFO, and president walked through the deck and answered questions, Mulholland said.
By the close of the campaign, Pacaso almost hit the $75 million cap, raising money from 17,500 investors. The minimum investment was just over $1,000. Allison said the average investment they received was a bit over $4,000.
The campaign drew a range of investors, but the typical demographic overlapped with the company’s customer profile — high-net-worth individuals aged 45 and above, with household incomes of $500,000 or more, Allison said.
“Only a handful of companies have ever raised over $70 million through Reg A — we’re among the top four. The average Reg A raise is closer to $16 million, so our campaign far exceeded expectations,” Allison said. “Many investors went on to become customers.”
See Pacaso’s pitch deck below.
