The Market Forming Around Private Shares

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For market-data companies, brokers, and financial institutions, growing activity in private shares creates an opportunity to offer new information and services to the clients they already serve

Consider how the property market changed when listings, comparable sales, and neighborhood data became easier to find. Buying a home remained a complex, individual transaction, but buyers, agents, lenders, and data companies could work from a clearer picture of the market.

A similar shift is beginning in private-company shares. More liquidity generates more evidence of demand and pricing. That evidence is useful well beyond the buyer and seller in any one transaction: data companies can turn it into intelligence, brokers can identify opportunities across their networks, and financial institutions can use it to serve clients interested in private companies. Platforms such as Forge Global, Nasdaq Private Market, and Secondary Suite illustrate different ways in which this broader market is taking shape.

Liquidity Becomes a Regular Consideration

A shareholder seeking to sell private-company stock once had relatively few obvious routes. A company might arrange liquidity around an IPO or acquisition, while other sales depended heavily on personal networks and a buyer willing to navigate the transfer.

Today, companies can offer shareholders opportunities to sell while continuing to operate privately. Nasdaq Private Market estimates that private-company tender offers reached $35 billion in 2025. Nearly half of the tender programs it ran that year involved companies from Seed through Series C, compared with about 30% two years earlier.

Activity is also growing outside company-organized programs. Trades closed by Nasdaq Private Market’s transfer and settlement team rose from $372 million in 2024 to $673 million in 2025. These figures describe one provider’s activity, but they show why liquidity can no longer be viewed solely as an event reserved for companies approaching an exit.

Each Transaction Adds to the Market’s Picture

A funding round establishes a valuation at a particular moment, under particular terms. It does not necessarily indicate what a buyer would pay for a shareholder’s shares today. Bids, offers, and completed secondary transactions add another perspective, especially when they can be compared over time.

Private-company pricing remains difficult to interpret. A bid may never result in a sale; different share classes can have different rights; and companies may restrict transfers. More trading therefore does not create the equivalent of a public stock ticker. It does, however, create information that participants can use to better understand demand, supply, and possible prices.

That is where the opportunity for market-data companies becomes tangible. Forge offers indicative prices and an index of actively traded private companies. Nasdaq Private Market provides pricing and market intelligence drawn from primary and secondary transactions. Secondary Suite offers estimated pricing data on 3,000+ Private tech companies in their unicorn stage, based on dozens of thousands of bids, asks and closed trade data points & in addition publishes its SS 50 Index, which highlights the market pricing changes based on the most traded private tech companies in the world.

The emergence of these offerings suggests that private-market data is becoming valuable in its own right, alongside the transactions that produce it.

A Wider Opportunity for Brokers and Institutions

For an investment bank, an asset manager or a broker-dealer, better visibility can reveal where a potential seller’s expectations meet buyer demand. It can help identify relevant counterparties and give clients more context when discussing a price. Relationships remain central, but information makes those relationships more useful across a larger number of opportunities.

Better visibility creates different possibilities across the industry: market-data companies can broaden their information products, brokers can manage more activity across their networks, and financial institutions can extend existing client services into private markets. The secondary market is becoming not only a venue for transactions, but a broader commercial ecosystem.

The Infrastructure Around the Trade

These services require more than a place to display shares. A participant may need market information, an understanding of its own buyer-seller relationships, a way to communicate opportunities, and visibility into transactions as they progress.

The market is developing in distinct layers. Forge combines transaction access with price discovery; Nasdaq Private Market pairs liquidity and settlement services with market intelligence; and Secondary Suite provides the workflow layer connecting pricing, counterparties, communications, and deal activity. All in all, they show how value is created by executing, interpreting, and managing transactions.

Private-company shares will remain distinct from listed securities, but the ecosystem around them is becoming more market-like. As liquidity becomes more regular, value will accrue not only to those executing transactions, but also to the firms that make activity visible, connect participants, and support deals from interest through settlement. The next stage of private-market growth will depend as much on this infrastructure as on the trades themselves.