Scaling Private Secondaries Through Software
Noel Moldvai and Adam Crawley, co-founders of Augment, on software-enabled secondaries markets
This points to a marketplace strategy built around turning brokers from competitors into distribution. In private secondaries, most volume still moves through fragmented broker relationships, email, spreadsheets, and manual closing work. If software helps brokers manage order books, onboard clients, collect KYC, and close trades faster, the result is not just share gain from another desk, but more total trades that previously would have died in process friction.
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The old model scaled by hiring brokers, which is expensive and naturally zero sum. The newer model uses software to let independent broker-dealers keep their client relationships while plugging into shared liquidity, which can pull in market volume that never sat on one platform to begin with.
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The bottleneck in secondaries is often not finding interest, but getting from interest to signed transfer. Company notices, ROFR workflows, transfer agent coordination, and cap table updates can take months. Augment is aiming at that plumbing, because shortening execution time raises completed volume for everyone on the network.
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This sits between the main alternatives. Nasdaq Private Market and Carta are issuer controlled tender infrastructure. Forge and EquityZen are more investor and employee access channels. Augment is trying to be the shared operating layer for brokers, buyers, sellers, and eventually issuers, so fragmented order flow can meet in one place.
If this works, private secondaries start to look less like bespoke brokerage and more like software mediated market structure. The winners will be the platforms that own execution workflow and broker connectivity, because that is what turns a thin, relationship driven market into a repeatable liquidity venue with much higher transaction frequency.