Forge and SharesPost as Prime Brokers
Hari Raghavan, ex-COO of Forge, on late-stage investing and facilitating secondary sales
This is really a claim about who owns the customer relationship in private stock trading. A prime broker is not just a venue where shares appear, it is the firm that brings buyers and sellers, helps them source blocks, finances and structures trades, manages settlement, and earns fees across the workflow. Forge and SharesPost moved in that direction by building investor networks, broker relationships, and execution services around messy private transactions, while issuer led products like Carta start from cap tables and company permission.
-
In practice, private secondaries are still not a clean exchange business. They are broker heavy and service heavy. Deals often require finding a seller, lining up demand, handling transfer restrictions, ROFRs, board approvals, and settlement. That favors an intermediary with buyer and seller relationships more than a pure venue.
-
SharesPost historically looked more like classic brokerage, matching buyers and sellers and collecting commissions. Forge added more tech and investor distribution, including forward contracts and an institutional desk. The 2020 Forge acquisition of SharesPost strengthened that broker network and institutional coverage.
-
Carta was built from the issuer side. Its edge is that the cap table, transfer records, tax history, and tender workflows already live in the system, which makes company approved auctions and tenders easier to run. That is closer to exchange infrastructure, where the issuer is the anchor customer and liquidity is company controlled.
The market is heading toward a split model. Issuer centric platforms will keep owning structured auctions and company sanctioned liquidity windows, while prime broker like platforms will keep monetizing the harder job of aggregating demand, sourcing supply, and moving blocks through a fragmented market. As private companies stay private longer, the larger profit pool should sit with whoever controls investor flow, not just the listing venue.