CartaX Issuer First Liquidity Platform
Arjun Sethi, co-founder of Tribe Capital, on investor allocation strategies and democratizing access to capital
The real claim is not that private markets can copy public markets, but that the winning layer will be the infrastructure that lets companies unlock liquidity without giving up control. CartaX was built to turn a cap table into a managed market, where a company chooses who can buy, who can sell, how often trading happens, and how much information gets shared. That starts by solving employee and investor liquidity, but the larger ambition is to add the missing rails that public markets already have, from price discovery to financing products.
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CartaX was designed as an issuer first system, not a free for all exchange. That means it looks less like Nasdaq on day one and more like software for running structured quarterly auctions tied directly to the cap table, with company controlled buyer lists, disclosure rules, and transaction limits.
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The comparison set matters. Forge and EquityZen were built more like marketplaces that help buyers and sellers find each other, often for smaller blocks, while CartaX and Nasdaq Private Market were built around company sponsored programs. Being head to head with public markets would require expanding from liquidity events into a full stack of services around custody, lending, investor access, and reporting.
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The bottleneck is not demand alone, it is trust. Carta had the system of record and the best shot at making secondary trading frictionless, but later evidence showed that trust between the cap table business and the brokerage function was fragile, and Carta exited direct secondary brokering. That underlines how hard it is to become the private market equivalent of a public exchange.
Over time, the likely path is that private market infrastructure becomes more modular. The system of record, the auction venue, the broker network, the pricing data, and eventually lending and derivatives will connect into one stack. If that happens, private companies will be able to stay private longer while still giving shareholders real liquidity, which is the clearest route to rivaling more of what public capital markets do today.