Platform Roles in Pre-IPO Liquidity

The market stayed fragmented because private stock is not one product, it is a bundle of very different transactions with different buyers, sellers, and control requirements. Employee sellers usually need a fast way to unload a small slice of stock. Issuers want to decide who gets onto the cap table, how much trades, and when. That split is why marketplace models and issuer run tender platforms grew side by side instead of one replacing the other.

• Forge and EquityZen are built for smaller block trades. Forge used forward contracts to give employees liquidity even when companies were reluctant to approve direct transfers, while EquityZen used fund structures so many buyers could be grouped into one line item on the cap table.
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• Nasdaq Private Market and Carta are built for company run programs. Nasdaq had $4.8B of 2019 volume across 87 programs with a median transaction size of $17.8M, which shows the market had shifted toward large tender offers rather than one off employee sales.
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• Carta’s advantage came from already holding the cap table system of record. That let it invite eligible sellers, reconcile ownership after closing, handle share transfers, and calculate tax details, which matters when a company wants recurring liquidity without turning every event into a manual legal project.
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Going forward, the winners are likely to be the platforms that best match a specific workflow, not the ones trying to be everything at once. Smaller employee trades will keep favoring fast marketplace infrastructure, while mature private companies moving toward IPO will keep favoring tightly controlled tender systems that deliver price discovery without giving up cap table control.