Caplight standardizes private market price discovery

The important point is that Caplight is turning an opaque broker workflow into market infrastructure. What used to be a week of phone calls and emails to roughly 25 likely counterparties can be broken into the same repeatable steps every time, collect interest, compare bids, find a clearing price, then execute. Once that workflow is standardized, software can make private market price discovery faster, cheaper, and easier to scale into a real venue for derivatives.

• This follows the same path other private market products have taken. Much of private stock trading still runs through handshake deals and brokers, but platforms like Zanbato, Nasdaq Private Market, Carta, Forge, and EquityZen each turned pieces of that manual process into software, data, and structured workflows.
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• The hard part is not just matching one buyer and one seller. In private markets, issuers want control, investors want size and price, and employees want speed. That is why Caplight starts with auctions for price discovery on derivatives, where the process can be standardized without requiring the underlying private shares to trade directly.
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• The strategic value is in the data exhaust. Each auction teaches which names draw interest, what strike and duration buyers want, and where bids cluster. That data can power better pricing models and eventually support hedging products, which is how Caplight moves from services revenue into infrastructure revenue.
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This is heading toward a private market stack that looks more like public markets, first broker workflows get digitized, then pricing data accumulates, then more financial products become possible on top. For Caplight, the prize is not just running cleaner auctions, it is becoming the system that institutions use to discover price and manage risk in private company exposure.