Vested Targets Underserved Option Holders
Dave Thornton, co-founder of Vested, on unlocking startup employee equity
Vested is building where the market is least efficient, small exercise financings for former employees at earlier stage companies. Most existing providers gravitate to later stage names and bigger checks, because those deals are easier to diligence, easier to place with investors, and easier to close. That leaves a real orphan segment, people with valuable options, a 90 day deadline, and not enough cash to exercise before the options expire.
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The underlying pain is structural, not niche. Private companies stay private longer, employees often leave before an IPO, and many cannot justify writing a personal check of tens of thousands of dollars to exercise uncertain options. Without financing, the choices are often bad, exercise with cash and tax risk, or walk away.
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Competitors like Secfi, Quid, and EquityBee have historically skewed toward later stage companies, larger transactions, or marketplace style demand that fills more reliably when investors already know the company. Vested explicitly said it sends bigger deals out and catches smaller or earlier stage deals that others pass on or fail to fill.
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That niche can still be large. Vested estimates 50% to 80% of post termination options expire unused, and said its first fund was on pace to fully deploy quickly enough that it began raising a successor fund about 4x larger. High referrals matter here because gratitude is a strong signal when a product saves equity that would otherwise disappear.
The next step is turning this wedge into infrastructure for the whole employee equity stack. As option funding becomes more normalized, the market should expand from ex employees into current employees, then into broader liquidity and price discovery products, with Vested well positioned if it keeps owning the small, urgent transactions others still find too hard to serve.