Graduated Disclosure in Private Secondaries
Noel Moldvai and Adam Crawley, co-founders of Augment, on software-enabled secondaries markets
Privacy controls are the bridge between a visible market and an issuer controlled one. In private stock, the hard problem is not just matching buyers and sellers, it is showing enough order flow to create trust and price discovery without blasting sensitive blocks to the whole market. A software layer that lets a seller reveal a block only to cap table members, family offices, or other vetted buyers makes the market feel more like a controlled data room than a public exchange, which is exactly what issuers and large holders need.
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This sits between two older models. Open, broker driven markets created distrust because companies lost control over who saw deals and who landed on the cap table. Tender offer platforms solved control, but often at the cost of closed door pricing and long, heavy workflows.
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The economic reason this matters is pricing. Closed tenders are usually anchored to the last round, and 83% were priced at or below that mark in one 64 tender data set, with average participation around 37%. Better targeted visibility can bring in more real buyers without fully opening the market.
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It also fits Augment's product design. The platform is built around direct negotiation, transparent order details, and software based execution, while also adding issuer and broker workflows. Privacy controls are what let those features coexist without forcing every block into a fully public bulletin board.
The next step is markets where disclosure is graduated instead of binary. The winning platforms will let companies choose who can see which inventory, how often liquidity windows open, and how far into execution outside parties can get. That is how private secondaries become more liquid without giving up cap table control.