Solving Liquidity in Private Markets
Noel Moldvai and Adam Crawley, co-founders of Augment, on software-enabled secondaries markets
Solving liquidity is what turns private stock from a niche brokered product into a real market. The constraint is no longer investor appetite, it is the thin, slow, fragmented trading layer between employees, funds, brokers, issuers, and transfer agents. When more blocks can actually clear, private companies gain a practical alternative to going public just to give shareholders cash and establish a market price.
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Today most private secondaries still move through emails, brokers, SPVs, and transfer workflows that can drag for months. That fragmentation suppresses volume, widens spreads, and lets intermediaries capture economics that would otherwise go to sellers through better prices and faster execution.
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The reason liquidity matters more than fresh capital is that late stage private companies can already raise huge primary rounds. What they often cannot do is let an employee sell enough stock for a house, let a VC return capital to LPs, or give the market a recurring price signal without running a full tender or IPO process.
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That is why platforms are converging on the plumbing, not just deal sourcing. Augment is building broker and issuer workflow software around matching and execution. EquityZen focuses on aggregating smaller buyers with institutional blocks. Issuer centric systems like Nasdaq Private Market and Carta optimize for company control over who trades and when.
The next phase of this market is a shift from occasional liquidity events to repeatable trading infrastructure. As execution gets more standardized and issuers accept regular controlled trading, a larger share of private company value should turn over each year, making private markets look less like locked cap tables and more like a slower, more controlled version of public equity markets.