Marketplaces and Issuer-Led Platforms
Andrea Walne, GP at Manhattan Venture Partners, on getting on the cap table
The key split is not platform brand, it is who controls the trade and who the product is built for. Forge, EquityZen, and often Zanbato are mainly matching markets, built to move blocks from willing sellers to outside buyers with lighter issuer involvement. CartaX and Nasdaq Private Market are closer to company run liquidity infrastructure, where the issuer sets the rules, selects participants, and uses tenders to shape the cap table and price discovery.
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Forge and EquityZen were designed around employee and investor initiated trades. Forge used forward contracts to work around transfer friction, while EquityZen pooled buyers into LLC funds so one vehicle, not many small investors, lands on the cap table. That made them better for smaller, one off transactions.
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Nasdaq Private Market and Carta grew from the issuer side. Nasdaq ran 87 secondary programs and $4.8B of volume in 2019, mostly tenders and repurchases. Carta's edge came from being the system of record for equity, which lets it reconcile cap tables, handle transfers, and make repeat liquidity events easier to run.
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Zanbato sits between the two buckets. It looks like a marketplace, but its network is institutional and broker driven, not retail like EquityZen. Between 2017 and 2020 it processed more than $29B of orders with an average trade size of $14M, which is much closer to block trading than crowdfunding style access.
The market is heading toward more specialization, not one winner. Marketplace models should keep serving ad hoc employee and investor sales, while issuer centric systems should win recurring tenders and pre IPO price discovery. Over time, the strongest platforms are likely to be the ones that combine issuer control, clean settlement, and enough investor demand to make private stock feel less like a bespoke negotiation and more like an actual market.