Vested Moves Up the Capital Stack
Dave Thornton, co-founder of Vested, on unlocking startup employee equity
This points to Vested becoming a deeper specialist in private equity ownership, not a broader personal finance brand. The next products sit above and below the employee common stockholder in the same company financing chain, first current employees who need exercise capital, then founders, and eventually preferred holders. That keeps Vested close to the same underwriting problem, the same transaction workflow, and the same moment of need, instead of moving into full service wealth management.
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Vested already describes its core business as funding option exercises for former employees, with future expansion aimed at current employees, founders, and the preferred layer. It explicitly frames this as growth within the capital stack, while saying wealth managers are better partners than a product lane to enter directly.
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That positioning fits how the market is splitting up. Vested focuses on smaller, earlier stage employee deals, while firms like Secfi and Quid concentrate on larger, later stage situations where there is enough company data to support heavier diligence. The vertical move is a way to widen volume without abandoning that niche.
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Compound and Savvy are built around ongoing advisory relationships, tax planning, portfolio management, and advisor networks. Compound said it had crossed $3B in AUM in March 2025, and Savvy describes itself as a technology enabled wealth management platform. Those businesses monetize long lived client relationships, while Vested monetizes specific private market transactions and fund exposure.
The likely endpoint is a private market finance layer that hands customers off to wealth managers after liquidity, rather than replacing them. As private companies stay private longer and more people need help exercising, holding, borrowing against, or selling private equity, the winning model is likely to be a set of specialized products mapped to each security holder in the cap table.