Private Shares Settling in 10 Days
Augment
The real product here is not matching buyers and sellers, it is collapsing weeks of post trade friction into software. Private share sales usually drag because every deal has to clear issuer approvals, ROFR notices, transfer restrictions, compliance checks, legal paperwork, and cap table updates, often through email and PDFs. Augment is trying to turn those steps into a single workflow, which is how settlement can move from the industry norm of 30 to 60 days toward roughly 10 days.
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The bottleneck in private secondaries has long been settlement, not matching. Prior market research describes the old process as a CFO nightmare of stock certificates, cap table changes, ROFRs, and transfer restrictions, with share exchanges often taking 3 to 6 months. That is the exact layer Augment automates.
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Augment’s founders built around this pain directly. One described a sale that took five months and required hiring a lawyer. The company then focused on automating issuer notice, approvals, and closing workflows, including tools for CFOs and transfer agents, because the 30 day ROFR convention came from paper mail era processes, not technical necessity.
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The comparison set shows why 10 days matters. Forge says direct share transactions typically settle in 45 to 60 days and can take weeks or months when board approvals, ROFRs, and legal steps are involved. Carta’s tender style programs reduce cap table friction, but even there, setup can take three to four months because the process is episodic and heavily issuer managed.
If this workflow layer keeps working, private share trading starts to look less like bespoke banking and more like modern market plumbing. That shifts competition toward who owns issuer workflows, compliance rails, and transfer infrastructure, and gives platforms like Augment a path from being a marketplace into core operating software for privately traded companies.