Bridging Institutional and Retail Investors
Atish Davda, CEO of EquityZen, on the biggest bottleneck in the secondary markets
This is a market structure shift, not just a bigger customer funnel. EquityZen’s edge is that it can turn one large institutional order into many smaller accredited investor allocations while keeping the issuer from dealing with dozens of new names on the cap table. That matters because private secondaries are still slowed by broker layers, SPV wrappers, and one off negotiations, so the platform that can aggregate fragmented demand into a clean executable block gets closer to real liquidity and cleaner price signals.
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EquityZen was built around an LLC fund structure where investors buy into a vehicle that holds the shares, which lets smaller checks participate while presenting a single line item to the company. That is the practical mechanism for mixing institutional size with accredited retail demand.
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The market has long been split by workflow. Zanbato is designed for broker dealers placing large institutional blocks. Forge and EquityZen focus on employee and investor liquidity in late stage names. Issuer led tenders from Nasdaq Private Market and Carta optimize for company control, but are slower and more bespoke.
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The reason this unlocks liquidity is simple. Sellers often have odd sized blocks, while buyers want different sizes and entry points. The 2020 market study estimated about $30B of private shares traded each year against roughly $1.5T of late stage private company value, showing how little of the market was actually clearing.
The next phase is a more exchange like private market where platforms compete on aggregation, settlement, and trust with issuers. The winners will be the ones that combine retail sized demand, institutional capital, and cap table friendly structures into a repeatable flow product, because that is what turns private stock from occasional dealmaking into a real market.