Private secondaries remain relationship driven
Hari Raghavan, ex-COO of Forge, on late-stage investing and facilitating secondary sales
The key point is that private share trading is still a relationship market, not a platform market. Most late stage liquidity still gets arranged by people who already sit on the cap table, founders, funds, employees, and brokers, because every deal depends on company specific transfer rules, board approvals, and who the issuer is willing to let in. That keeps a large share of volume in one off introductions instead of on standardized venues.
-
The market is larger than platform prints suggest. Research on pre IPO liquidity estimated private company secondary volume at more than $30B in 2020, while many transfers were still handled by boutique banks and specialist funds outside the major software platforms.
-
Platforms split into different jobs. Forge and EquityZen built marketplace style workflows for matching smaller blocks between employees and investors, while Nasdaq Private Market and similar issuer led tools run company approved tenders and repurchases. Neither model captures the full universe of informal cap table to cap table trades.
-
The bottleneck is not just finding a buyer. Each company can have different ROFR rules, board consent requirements, forward contract limits, and holder restrictions, so deals often need manual negotiation. That is why secondaries remain high touch and why off platform brokers and direct networks still matter.
The market is heading toward more structured, repeatable liquidity programs, but not a single winner take all exchange. As issuers adopt recurring tenders, wealth platforms add private markets, and pricing data gets more standardized, more of todays handshake volume should move into software assisted channels. The platforms that win will be the ones that can fit into company rules without slowing deals down.