Semper Clears Price To Maximize Volume
Q&A with Balthazar de Lavergne and Mathias Pastor at Semper
Semper is trying to turn private share sales from a fixed price company exercise into a real market clearing process. Instead of management or one lead buyer naming a price up front, Semper collects seller indications from employees, buyer bids from institutions, and picks the single price where the most shares can actually trade. That creates better price discovery, reduces the risk of a badly undersubscribed sale, and keeps the process lighter than a classic tender offer.
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A tender offer usually starts with one buyer and one preset price, often tied to the last round. That is simple, but often stale. Across 64 tender offers totaling more than $3B, 83% were priced at or below the last round, and participation averaged 37%, which shows how often fixed price liquidity misses where sellers actually want to transact.
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Semper is closer to an auction. Employees state how much they would sell and at what price. Institutional buyers bid based on the company data they get. The platform then clears at the price that maximizes matched volume. Carta described a similar auction logic as solving the one sided price discovery problem that makes tenders inefficient and often undersubscribed.
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This matters most in private markets because manual brokered trades are slow, opaque, and conflict prone. Research on the broader category shows secondary transfers still often take three to six months, and investors like Andromeda argue bank run tenders can favor the biggest preexisting relationships over the best price. A volume maximizing clearing process is designed to pull in more real demand without giving up issuer control.
The next step is recurring issuer run auctions that happen often enough to build a live market signal, but still stay controlled enough for companies to manage disclosure and their cap table. If that model spreads, private liquidity shifts from occasional employee relief to a real financing layer, one that helps companies recruit, helps investors size positions, and gives management a much clearer read on what their stock is worth before an IPO or major fundraise.