Overview
Alex Prince is an investor and capital-markets operator with more than two decades across institutional asset management, investment banking, and private markets, including prior roles at Merrill Lynch, Highmark Capital Management, and Bailard. His public bio cites more than $2 billion in capital deployed and raised. He carries more than 250 concurrent financial-advisor and family-office relationships, closed a $250M allocation from a single multi-family office, has transacted more than $150M across the most sought-after private technology names since 2023, and raised more than $7.5M of debt for a consumer sleep company as strategic advisor. Earlier he founded Red Sam Financial, scaled it to 30-plus agents, sold its mortgage arm to Bank of America and wound it down in the 2008 crisis.
He is the founder of Prince Capital, a private investment advisory firm; he is a registered representative holding the Series 7 and Series 63. At Common Ground he leads the Capital & Investment discipline and originates the group's deals; capital work across the group sits under Prince Capital.
Prince is also a co-founder of HighTide Capital Group, and co-GP of the Romulus Entertainment Fund (see Romulus Entertainment). His education is the Institute of Business Finance at Diablo Valley College.
Career, from his own account
Recorded September 20, 2026; figures trace to the Common Ground wins ledger.
Alex Prince founded Red Sam Financial in 2004 or 2005 and scaled it to about $7M to $8M in revenue with thirty real estate and loan agents before the subprime crisis forced a wind-down. He sold the mortgage arm to Bank of America and ran that branch for about a year, then started his institutional career on Merrill Lynch's alternatives desk through the financial crisis. At Highmark Capital he covered Southern California, Hawaii and Nevada and grew the territory from $20M to $87M in three years, a 335% increase, finishing number one on the sales team. After a hedge-fund stint covering multi-family offices and RIAs in managed futures, Bailard brought him over on the recommendation of Highmark's CEO. He started as a portfolio specialist speaking at conferences on international and emerging-market equities and rose to Managing Director and Head of Mutual Fund Distribution, building out the firm's mutual-fund distribution platform. His largest single ticket, close to $250M from a Newport Beach multi-family office, went into that emerging-markets portfolio.
In 2017 he launched Prince Capital, a family-office-style private investment advisory working late-stage private markets in names such as OpenAI, SpaceX, Anduril, Anthropic, Perplexity, Databricks, Crusoe, Kalshi and Higgsfield AI. The firm has transacted more than $150M across those names since 2023. He is a strategic advisor to Spectrum Sleep, for which he raised more than $7.5M of debt, and co-GP of the Romulus Entertainment film-finance fund, now being set up with 2027 in view. His LinkedIn, built for allocators, has passed 5,500 followers with individual posts reaching 159,000 and 200,000 impressions; his method is a data-led infographic, a written hook, and the follow-up and commenting that most people skip. At Common Ground his institutional standard is the review bar for the group's finance work: if an output cannot survive his review, it does not ship.
Common Ground work in 2026
Recorded October 7, 2026, from the partner mail record; clients and deal counterparties are described by role or codename, never by name.
The dental group he brought in
A private-equity-backed dental group, built office by office through acquisitions, came to Common Ground through Alex's own relationship with its principal, and he carried it to paper himself. He took the business side: the scope, the price and the case for the work. When the client needed the technical deep dive, he handed it to Robby Prochnow and let the specialist carry it. Jesse stayed the operating lead.
HighTide Capital Group
Alex holds the financing and structure seat at HighTide Capital Group, a buy-and-build platform for owner-operated trade and home-services companies in Arizona. Jesse is the operator in the seat. Alex owns how a deal gets paid for and put together: seller paper against SBA, entity design, and the coverage and cash-flow tests a lender will run. Nothing has closed yet. The first target, HT-003, is at the letter-of-intent stage, and HT-008 has been through a diligence analysis.
Reading the rulebook before the lender does
On HT-003 Alex tested SBA 7(a) against all-seller financing line by line, measured against the platform's own non-negotiable terms. Several of those terms break under SBA, so the deal stayed on seller paper. In the same read he found a new SBA rule, effective October 1, 2026, that opens an expansion lane for same-trade add-ons once the first business has been owned for two full fiscal years. Closing the first deal in 2026 rather than early 2027 starts that clock a year sooner, so the timing of the close came out of the rulebook, not out of impatience.
Where HighTide's deals actually come from
When Jesse asked where HighTide's inbound was coming from, Alex did not guess. He went back through every inquiry the website form had ever received and checked how the site showed up in search. Then he read the general mailbox and found the real channel: business owners were writing in by email and quoting the published criteria back to HighTide, and most had not been answered. He pulled the ones that had landed in spam, added source tracking and analytics to the site the same week, and answered the backlog with one short set of questions: how long the business has run, what it earns after paying the owner a market salary, how many people it employs and where the revenue comes from.
HighTide buys outright or alongside an owner who wants a partial exit. When a company is too small, Alex says so the same day instead of leaving the owner waiting.
The diligence protocol
Alex and Jesse work HighTide's buy-side diligence in a fixed order: the liability search first because it is the cheapest, then customer concentration, then an earnings rebuild at realistic staffing levels, then the lender's coverage and covenant tests. A blank is never a pass.
Medical device US entry
When an overseas medical-device company set out to enter the US, the capital side was structured to run through Prince Capital while Common Ground ran the diligence, and the diligence was gated before any investor saw a page. Alex was the capital partner on that split.
Prince Capital in full
Prince Capital's own engagements, the decisions behind them and Alex's career as he tells it are written up on the firm's own Prince Capital wiki, linked from the Prince Capital page.
At a glance
| Role at Common Ground | Capital & Investment · deal origination |
|---|---|
| Firm | Prince Capital |
| Registrations | Series 7 · Series 63 |
| Website | aprince.io |