Velvet intelligence layer for secondaries

This points to Velvet trying to own the intelligence layer of private market trading, not the pipe that settles trades. The bet is that the scarcest asset in secondaries is not matching engine software, it is knowing which funds may want to sell, which buyers are credible, what a company looks like on the inside, and when a transaction should happen. If that works, Velvet can sit above brokers, SPV tools, and marketplaces as the workflow where demand gets formed.

• Private secondaries are still fragmented and broker led. Existing platforms split across different jobs. Forge and EquityZen help move individual blocks, Zanbato routes institutional broker flow, and issuer centric tools like Nasdaq Private Market and Carta focus on controlled tenders. That leaves room for a neutral front end that aggregates data and routes deals across all of them.
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• Velvet already combines a daily diligence product with a placement business. In the interview, the company says it has processed 12,000 deals through the software side and executed about $220 million of private placements over the prior 14 months, charging annual SaaS contracts on one side and roughly 2% to 5% placement or SPV fees on the other.
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• The strategic lesson from CartaX is that owning sensitive cap table data does not automatically make an exchange work. Velvet is framing the safer position as a sandboxed AI workspace for each fund, with deal suggestions and liquidity access triggered by user led, double opt in actions rather than platform staff pushing volume through a captive market.
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The next step is a private market stack where agents do the screening, memo writing, buyer seller matching, and process orchestration, while humans keep the final call and the relationship. If that model takes hold, the winning company will look less like a single exchange and more like the operating system that every fund and LP uses before any trade reaches an exchange at all.