SPVs Enable Principal Trading
Noel Moldvai, CEO of Augment, on building the Robinhood for private markets
The real product in private secondaries is not matching buyers and sellers, it is certainty of execution. Once a platform has already bought the block, cleared the company side friction, and placed the asset into an SPV, it can turn a 3 to 6 month bespoke transfer into a near instant purchase of fund interests. That is why principal trading looks more like software, while pure matching keeps collapsing back into broker work.
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Older marketplaces like Forge and EquityZen were built to reduce transfer friction through forward contracts or fund structures, but both still emerged from a world where direct share transfers were slow, approval heavy, and operationally messy. That history explains why matching alone has been hard to scale.
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SPVs solve a concrete bottleneck. The company sees one vehicle on the cap table instead of many small buyers, investors can buy smaller slices, and later trading in the SPV interest can happen without reopening ROFR and transfer approval at the issuer level.
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This also changes who the customer is. Matching marketplaces mainly serve one off sellers and buyers. Principal platforms first serve supply acquisition, then package that inventory into a repeatable retail and wealth product with fixed pricing, low minimums, and faster settlement.
The market is heading toward firms that own both supply and post trade rails. The winners will look less like listing boards and more like inventory led exchanges for private company exposure, with SPVs acting as the tradable wrapper that makes recurring liquidity, broader distribution, and app like user experience possible.