Broker relationships power private secondaries
Noel Moldvai and Adam Crawley, co-founders of Augment, on software-enabled secondaries markets
This shift means the real asset in private secondaries is no longer the platform’s broker headcount, it is the broker’s own book of relationships. In practice, a broker who knows the buyers and sellers in Stripe, SpaceX, or Databricks stock can leave a big platform, join a small independent broker-dealer, keep far more of each fee, and bring that order flow along. That weakens closed platforms built around captive brokers and strengthens software that helps independent brokers move faster.
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Private secondaries have long been a brokered market. Even newer venues still depend on bilateral matching, where a broker finds a buyer for a seller and then pushes a deal through transfer restrictions, ROFRs, and settlement. That is why personal relationships still matter so much.
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The economic split is what changes behavior. In this interview, platform broker payouts had fallen from above 50% to around 25%, while independent broker-dealers could let teams keep 70% to 90% of commissions. When the broker owns the client relationship, that payout gap is enough to pull talent away.
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This creates an opening between two older models. Issuer-centric systems like CartaX are built around company controlled auctions and disclosures. Broker networks like Zanbato are built around inter-broker institutional flow. Augment is positioning as software for the fragmented middle, where independent brokers need order books, messaging, and execution tools without giving up economics.
The next step is a private market stack where brokers stay independent but use shared software for discovery, negotiation, and closing. As more volume sits with small broker teams instead of captive platform employees, the winners should be the networks that become the default operating system for those brokers, not the marketplaces that try to employ them all.