Raising Investor Cap Unlocks Retail
Ben Haber, CEO of Monark, on building the DTCC for the private markets
Raising the investor cap is not just a compliance tweak, it changes private market distribution from a boutique product into something brokerages can sell at retail scale. With a 99 investor ceiling, one SPV has to serve a small pool of large check writers, which keeps minimums high. If that ceiling expands materially, platforms like Monark can spread the same deal across far more accounts, lower ticket sizes toward $10,000, and make pre-IPO access look more like a brokerage product than a one off private placement.
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Monark sits in the plumbing, not the storefront. Its API handles suitability checks, trade processing, money movement, reporting, and in some cases custody through clearing firms, so a brokerage can offer private deals inside the same account where a user already holds stocks and cash.
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The bottleneck is mechanical. When an SPV can only take 99 investors, issuers either run multiple vehicles or keep minimums high. Monark identifies that cap as the main reason many pre-IPO offerings still land at $25,000 to six figure minimums, even when demand exists lower down market.
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There is a clear precedent for what broader access unlocks. EquityZen built retail oriented access with $10,000 minimums through fund structures, while AngelList turned venture vehicles into software products. Monark is extending that logic into brokerage rails, where distribution can be much larger if regulation allows more holders per vehicle.
If private market rules keep moving toward larger vehicles and broader eligibility, the winning platforms will look less like marketplaces and more like market infrastructure. That points toward a future where pre-IPO stock, evergreen private funds, and other alternatives sit inside ordinary brokerage and wealth accounts, with Monark positioned as the operating layer that makes those products easy to launch and safe to scale.