Two-tier private liquidity market
Dave Thornton, co-founder of Vested, on unlocking startup employee equity
This split is really about manufacturing certainty in an opaque market. Secfi and Quid put analysts on each company because they are effectively making concentrated bets, so they need enough outside data, enough scale, and enough expected exposure to justify the work. That naturally pulls them toward larger late-stage companies, where financing teams, recent rounds, and more visible operating signals make a deal easier to underwrite than a small option exercise at a thinner-information startup.
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In private-company liquidity, platforms tend to divide by who they optimize for. EquityZen and Forge help move smaller employee blocks, while Nasdaq Private Market and Carta run issuer-controlled tenders. Secfi and Quid sit in the option funding lane, where the hard part is deciding which private companies are safe enough to finance against.
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That underwriting burden is high because private shares do not trade often, company financials are rarely public, and the buyer is usually taking common stock or forward exposure with real downside. The result is a slower, more selective model that favors bigger checks and companies with enough information to build conviction.
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Vested is positioned on the opposite side of that tradeoff. Instead of trying to know a few companies extremely well, it is built to automate smaller exercises across many early and mid-stage companies, using broad filters to avoid obvious blowups rather than deep work to maximize single-name exposure.
The market is likely to keep separating into two layers. One layer will look more like institutional credit for late-stage names, with heavy diligence and large positions. The other will look more like scaled financial infrastructure for employees, where speed, automation, and small-ticket underwriting open a much wider set of option exercises.