Europe leapfrogs to company-controlled liquidity
Q&A with Balthazar de Lavergne and Mathias Pastor at Semper
Europe is not inventing a different secondary market, it is skipping straight to the company controlled version that Silicon Valley arrived at only after years of messy employee sales and issuer backlash. In practice that means European founders are learning faster that liquidity only works when the company sets the rules, approves buyers, and packages employee selling into a structured process instead of letting random marketplace activity dictate who ends up on the cap table.
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The U.S. playbook was shaped by Facebook era chaos, when open trading on platforms like SecondMarket and SharesPost pushed companies to tighten transfer restrictions and reclaim control. Semper is describing Europe absorbing that lesson upfront, before open pre-IPO trading became entrenched.
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That is why Semper is built around company initiated programs. Management signs off first, employees submit how much they want to sell, investors bid, and the company keeps control over approvals and information sharing. It is closer to an issuer run auction than an open marketplace.
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The main comparison is Carta and Nasdaq Private Market in the U.S., which won by helping issuers run tenders and liquidity programs, not by acting like free trading venues. The durable product in this category is workflow software for CFOs and legal teams, not just buyer seller matching.
The next step is more European companies treating liquidity as recurring infrastructure, like compensation planning or cap table management. As private companies stay private longer, the winners will be the platforms that make secondary sales predictable for employees while keeping founders firmly in control of price discovery, disclosures, and who gets onto the cap table.