Early visibility drives private secondary edge
Ani Banerjee, co-founder of Andromeda Group, on secondary diligence and companies staying private
The real edge in private secondaries sits with whoever sees inventory before everyone else. Platforms like Forge and EquityZen become useful because they act like market maps for an opaque market, they know which company stock is circulating, whether the block is small employee paper or a larger investor sale, and roughly how much supply exists. That information matters because most private share sales still happen through scattered brokers, emails, and one off negotiations rather than on a true exchange.
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This market is opaque by design. Private company shares usually trade through brokers and platform networks, so the parties who collect seller interest first get the best read on who wants liquidity, how urgent the sale is, and what size block is actually available.
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Knowing who has what block is different from owning that block. Ani Banerjee notes that platforms often still need to syndicate demand through SPVs or other structures before confirming the trade, which is why buyers are pushed to commit quickly even when the supply sounds firm.
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Different platforms know different parts of the market. Marketplace models like Forge and EquityZen are strongest with smaller employee and investor sales, while issuer run systems like Nasdaq Private Market and Carta are built for company controlled tenders and larger, more structured liquidity programs.
Over time, the advantage will shift from knowing where blocks are to turning that knowledge into cleaner execution. As more liquidity moves onto issuer controlled systems with built in cap table data and transfer workflows, market intelligence will matter less as gossip and more as infrastructure, which should make private secondaries faster, more transparent, and less broker driven.