Todd Ault: Founder of Ault Alliance, Inc., Is at the Forefront of the Country’s Medical and Metaverse Advances
Todd Ault is the founder of the holding company Ault Alliance, Inc., who also holds many of the companies he invests in close to his heart. From healthcare to infrastructure, plus the metaverse and EV, the core parts of the diverse company, this visionary entrepreneur is always envisioning a brighter future, one vaccine, electric bus or better constructed bridge and defense system at a time.
The idea of running a holding company took hold of Todd as an adolescent who grew up in Southern California and lived in subsidized housing as a young kid. When cable tv finally came to his area, Todd loyally watched Money Line with Lou Dobbs – one of the shows on all 13 channels they received at the time – and one episode in particular piqued his interest: Warren Buffet. The future founder contacted Warren Buffet’s office whose assistant, Gladys, sent the aspiring young investor every single annual report since he had been chairman. Though Todd says he had to get hit in the head a few times instead of listening to all of Buffet’s teachings, he continued on his idol’s path.
Growing up with a single mom until the age of 13, Todd’s parents didn’t have the money to send him to a four-year college. Instead, he bounced around to a few different schools and wound up at Chapman University on the West Coast. He thrived in a college atmosphere and just like Buffet, Todd landed a job as a broker. After calling one of the branch managers at Dean Witter every Monday for six weeks, he finally gave into a newly graduated and very persistent Todd, who began training class right as the first bombing of the World Trade Center rocked the world. Todd also found himself moving up the ranks very quickly at this new job.
“I was super curious and just really into it,” explains Todd. “I convinced them to let me run syndicate and worked in branch institutional sales. I just learned as quickly as I could. I’m a consumer
of data. If an offering happened, let’s say someone took something public or someone did a buyout of some deal, I would go on to the SCC filings and I would read anything that was available. Over time I learned about how the deals got done and who did the deals and I just continually put myself in a place where I would meet the people who would do the deals. It’s really just a story of me putting myself in the right position all the time and constantly learning about what was happening.”
Fast forward to today, and Todd has stayed just as curious and ambitious for 33 years now. He was the founder of Patient Safety Technologies, Inc., which had a cervical sponge system, something which prevents the sponge from being left behind in the body. That company, which he founded in 2004, ended up being sold to Stryker for $120 million in 2013. Todd became an activist investor as well and was involved in Jack in the Box after they had an E.coli scare before going on to work with a company called Tacloban which got sold for private equity for ironically, and not too shabbily, another $120 million.
It was in 1998, the same year that his first daughter Miranda was born, that he went out on his own. “I started my own hedge fund and from there I constantly learned how to do things. It was an evolution which started when I took over my first company in 2004 called Franklin Capital. It was on the American Stock Exchange, and that led to Patient Safety Technologies, Inc., which was sold to Stryker. I made some stupid mistakes, no question, and had a big setback in late 2008 and into 2009. After Patient Safety was sold, one main investor, Steve Caspi, a New York real estate investor and hotel owner, encouraged me to get back into it and do those things I believed in. I decided to buy control of another public company on what was the old American Stock Exchange, and from there built a holding company in late 2016. I think sales at the time were under $6 or $7 million and assets were under $3.5 million and here we are in 2023 with public and private assets of close to $600 million.”
Ault, the name given to him when he was adopted by the man his mother remarried, is now the name of the company he has grown to astounding heights. It was, after all, his grandfather who lent him $1400 at the age of 18 when he needed some help, and his appreciation is now a part of his company’s legacy of success and giving back.
That company, which is very broadly diversified, owns 55 cranes as part of a crane rental company called Circle 8, as well as a lending company based in California that does lending to a variety of small public companies and remains a very considerable platform for them.
They also own data centers in Michigan and Montana as well as one small one in Texas, but according to Todd, who lights up at the mention of it, the center in Michigan is a powerhouse. “We bought an old copper plant that sits on 34.5 acres, and we have 28 megawatts of power that can be expanded to 300 megawatts, all on a facility which is 14 acres, or similar to the size of a 9-hole golf course.”
This expansive facility, which is 617,000 square feet, was purchased for $4.4 million with Todd’s company investing about $16 million in the project in order to create a big data center as well as a mixed real estate opportunity which is currently leased out to 18 tenants. This powerful data center is running just under 10,000 bitcoin miners and is mining bitcoin in the $70 million range.
Let’s just say that Todd is extremely bullish on bitcoin as he believes that being inherently uncorruptible makes it the purest and most important form of a digital asset. Another reason he is a bitcoin believer? Unlike becoming a hotel owner and investor – he owns multiple Marriot’s and Hilton Hotels in the Midwest and is an investor in Fouquet’s, the trendy new Tribeca hotel from where he is speaking when we are conducting our Zoom meeting – there is no upkeep or servicing required.
“A common theme for me is that I buy undervalued assets or disruptive technologies and bitcoin is disruptive to centralized assets. I don’t have to pay to maintain it or pay interest to keep it or service it. I see value in in the idea of its scarcity and it’s also global, so bitcoin in New York is the same as bitcoin in Brazil and South Korea and every other country on the globe. I am a believer in anything that is disruptive. The US can stay the leader if we get some real rules and legislation around cryptocurrency, but we’re still waiting for some of those rules to be put in place. I remember being young when cellphones were super expensive and big and I thought, why would I use a cellphone when I can use a regular phone or a pager? Anything that’s disruptive can be controversial, especially something that does not have centralized control.”
Family is also always at the forefront of his focus, especially in the business named after his own family. About five or six years ago, Todd founded a company called Alzamend Neuro which has a vaccine and treatment for Alzheimer’s, a disease which claimed the lives of his grandparents and mother-in-law, and which has now plagued his own father. His involvement with the company, which he took public about two years ago, all came about due to another television program, this time a special on CNN with Dr. Sanjay Gupta who was speaking with a scientist working on a treatment for the disease at the University of South Florida. After calling the scientist directly and finding out that there was hardly any financial backing of the university’s research, Todd did what he does best – he took action and soon found himself on a plane to meet with him and the team in person. He wound up licensing their first immunotherapeutic vaccine, an ALZN002 mutant peptide, as well as a lithium drug compound. Todd explains that many people are not aware that while lithium is known for bipolar disorder, it can also help slow the progression of Alzheimer’s, which is why he backed a safer lithium compound and eventually took the company public in June of 2021. That first day, the company had a market cap of over $3.3 billion and Todd controlled half of it. The vaccine, which got cleared by the FDA to go into patients and is now in phase 1a and 2a, is showing exciting progress.
“It’s a healthy compound that helps people and I just want to deliver it in safer way. It’s one of the things I’m most excited about because it represents an opportunity to help a lot of people. My
father is in a home and it’s really awful watching someone you know going through it. We think drugs associated with Alzheimer’s will have the most success over time.”
He is also an investor in AdTech Pharma, Inc., which is making a glaucoma treatment with plans to go into patients in the next year and a half or so as well as a few other potential drugs. “Society’s problem is that nothing is ever low cost anymore. Developing drugs is expensive and getting the drugs is expensive and so we have to press forward and invest in stuff in healthcare and so we’re doing that in a big way.”
The holding company founder see’s the future as happening now and has made it his mission to make the metaverse more accessible and understandable. His online metaverse, BitNile.com, which recently went public on the Nasdaq, doesn’t even require a headset. Instead, you can be on a cellphone or computer with an avatar and have a 1,000 people in one room. By being able to access everything via the browser, you don’t need to go to Facebook or Google or Apple and get permission.
“The metaverse we have created is a social environment where you can have the real world in digital form and can access anything from any place in the world and I don’t think it’s going away. When I was younger you wanted to be outside, and my mom would ground me if I was in trouble and make me stay at home. Today, when I tell my young kids they have to stay home, they are thrilled. They want to be on a computer. I think global socialization is here to stay. The headset is just not something that people want to wear all the time so instead we have a metaverse that is ubiquitous and can be accessed from any device. We have already had about 1.4 million engaged users since launching in March and we’re just getting started.”
The diverse holding company currently has about 18 subsidiaries and each company has its own team. Todd continues to raise capital and help them grow themselves. Their expansive portfolio includes older companies as well, such as investments in England which have been around for years. This includes a company which was part of the original 1969 business known as Digital Power. They are also own a small defense company as well as a company in Israel that helps with the Iron Dome Missile System.
Always moving full speed ahead, they also have investments in EV, or electric vehicles, as they are hoping to help the country catch up with the demand and have already helped convert electric UPS vans. Todd admits it’s ambitious, especially as New York has a deadline for turning all school buses electric, but their goal remains trying to create a holding company that can make a difference and be a part of people’s lives for years to come. They also believe that the country’s infrastructure, from roads to bridges, is in need of a massive upgrade, which is going to be a big theme for Ault over the next 20 years.
Ault Alliance might have already reached peak altitude with their variety of investments, but Todd is already focused on the next takeover which will undoubtedly be at the forefront of the next medical or metaverse advances.
