Velvet Operating System for Private Markets
Alex Johnson, co-founder & CEO of Velvet, on vertical AI for venture capital
The real prize is not an exchange first, it is the daily operating system that captures private market data before a trade ever happens. In public markets, Bloomberg is where participants research names, message counterparties, and watch prices, while NASDAQ and NYSE are where orders clear. In private markets those functions are still split across decks, email, CRMs, cap tables, brokers, and tender software. Velvet is pointing at a product that starts as workflow and data infrastructure, then earns the right to become a marketplace.
-
Private secondaries still behave more like a broker market than an exchange. Most deals are sourced through emails, calls, and bilateral matching, with software helping around the edges. That is why Alex frames liquidity discovery as the first unsolved problem, with price discovery only coming after enough buyers, sellers, and data are in one place.
-
Carta is the clearest recent example of why the middle layer matters. Its cap table system gave it the ledger and transfer rails, but its marketplace push ran into a trust problem because companies did not want their system of record also acting like a broker. That showed that owning the data alone is not enough, the workflow has to feel aligned with users before liquidity can scale.
-
The closest public market analogy is a stack, not a single product. Carta looks like the ledger and transfer agent, broker networks and platforms like Forge, Hiive, Zanbato, and Augment handle matching, and Bloomberg-like tools sit on top with chat, research, and pricing context. Velvet is trying to start higher in the stack, at the place investors already spend time making decisions.
Over time, the winners in private market liquidity will be the products that become indispensable before a transaction, not just during one. If a platform becomes the place where GPs, LPs, and brokers evaluate deals, organize documents, and map counterparties every day, it can gradually turn fragmented private trading into something that feels much closer to a market.