Late-Stage Shift to Infrastructure and Data
Andrea Walne, GP at Manhattan Venture Partners, on getting on the cap table
The key shift was that late stage private investing stopped being driven mainly by famous consumer apps and started being driven by businesses with clearer cash flow, clearer comps, and clearer paths to price discovery. Infrastructure and data companies fit secondary buyers better because they look more like durable enterprise software. They sell into IT budgets, their usage is easier to model, and public market software multiples gave buyers a firmer anchor for what private shares might be worth.
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In private secondaries, investors often value companies using public software comps and the eventual S 1 as a reference point. That naturally favors enterprise and data companies over consumer names, because revenue quality and peer sets are easier to compare across public and private markets.
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These companies also became more attractive because the biggest consumer unicorns had already gone public. As names like Snap, Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb moved out of the late stage private pool, more capital focused on enterprise SaaS, infrastructure, and data systems that were still private and still scaling fast.
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What looks unsexy at the product level can be powerful at the market level. A company like Databricks sells core data infrastructure that is hard to rip out once deployed, and that stickiness makes later stage shares more appealing to secondary buyers looking for lower volatility and longer duration growth.
Going forward, this points to a private market that increasingly rewards companies that behave more like disciplined public software businesses before they list. The winners will be infrastructure and data platforms that combine strong retention, repeatable usage, and enough disclosure to support regular secondary trading, which in turn makes staying private longer easier.