Bundling and SPVs for Secondary Liquidity
Dan Akivis, senior associate at Expansion VC, on selling secondary and managing LP relationships
Bundling is a way for an early stage fund to turn one liquid name into a disposal channel for harder to sell positions. In practice, a buyer wants the hot company, but the seller uses that demand to move a second name the buyer would not have pursued alone. That works because private secondary markets are driven less by clean price discovery and more by scarce information, fragmented buyer networks, and one off negotiation.
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The underlying problem is that many sub scale private positions are not independently marketable. Akivis describes strong demand for a few portfolio names, but very little buyer conviction in lesser known companies because buyers lack current company information and management usually will not educate off cycle secondary buyers.
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This makes the hot name function like an anchor tenant in a shopping center. The buyer is really paying up for X, and accepts Y as a smaller option bet. That is why bundled trades can clear where single name outreach stalls, especially for companies below the headline unicorn tier.
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The broader market has been moving toward structures that reduce this friction. SPVs and LP interests can be traded above the cap table with less company involvement, while issuer led tenders work because the company controls information flow and buyer access. Both approaches solve the same bottleneck that bundling is trying to work around manually.
The next step is more standardized packaging of private exposure. Instead of selling one company at a time, funds and platforms will increasingly group positions into SPVs, LP interests, and curated baskets that let buyers underwrite a portfolio slice rather than a single opaque startup. That shift should make secondary liquidity less episodic and less dependent on a single breakout name.