80% Secondary Volume Without Data
Q&A with Balthazar de Lavergne and Mathias Pastor at Semper
The lack of data is what turns private secondaries into a market for famous logos instead of a market for underlying businesses. When buyers cannot see revenue, growth, margins, or recent company updates, they gravitate to names like SpaceX where press coverage and repeated tender activity create enough signal to price risk. That leaves the long tail of private companies illiquid, and it gives platforms that package research, disclosures, and transaction infrastructure a direct way to expand trading beyond marquee names.
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Most private company secondary volume still sits inside a small market relative to the value locked on startup cap tables. About $30B of shares traded annually versus roughly $1.5T of late stage venture backed equity value, showing how little of the asset class is actually liquid when information and process are scarce.
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The market has repeatedly concentrated around companies with more public signal. Facebook drove almost all volume on early private exchanges before its IPO, and later names like Spotify used recurring secondary activity plus regular disclosure to build pricing history before listing. Information does not just help buyers, it creates the trading itself.
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Platforms are converging on the same fix from different angles. Semper gives outside investors a data room and aggregates them into one cap table line item. EquityZen and Forge describe the biggest bottlenecks as fragmentation, issuer control, and too many intermediaries, all of which get worse when buyers lack clean company level information.
The next phase of the market is likely to look more like a managed middle ground between private and public. More companies will run recurring liquidity programs, share a tighter set of operating metrics, and use structured platforms to keep control of buyers and cap tables. As that happens, capital should spread beyond the handful of household names and the secondary market should become a real financing layer for many more private companies.