The Secondary Market for Private Shares: How Investors Are Getting Liquidity Without Waiting for an IPO

For most of private equity's history, getting in meant accepting one hard constraint: you could not get out until the fund decided to exit. Investments were locked up for seven to ten years. IPOs, M&A deals, and dividend recapitalizations were the primary ways money came back to investors. If none of those happened on schedule, investors waited.

That constraint has not disappeared. But a parallel market has grown up around it, one that is now large enough to reshape how private capital flows through the entire system.

A $226 billion market that most people have never heard of

The private equity secondary market allows investors to sell their stakes in private funds or companies before the original investment matures. A pension fund that needs liquidity sells its position in a private equity fund to a secondary buyer who steps into the original investor's shoes. A startup employee who received equity grants sells shares to an institutional buyer before the company goes public. A venture fund manager creates a continuation vehicle to hold a top-performing company longer, offering early investors a chance to cash out.

Secondary market transaction volume hit $226 billion in 2025, crossing the $200 billion threshold for the first time and surpassing the prior year record by 41%, according to Evercore. Three of the ten largest private equity funds that closed in 2025 were focused on secondaries. Jefferies projects that first-half 2026 volume will exceed $100 billion based on deal backlog alone. Coller Capital, one of the oldest and largest secondary buyers, was acquired by Swedish buyout group EQT for up to $3.7 billion in January 2026.

The scale reflects a structural shift. With IPO markets largely closed through most of 2024 and 2025, and M&A activity subdued, secondary sales became the primary route for investors to get capital back. As KKR Partner Alisa Wood put it bluntly: "You can't eat IRR. You actually need capital coming back."

The venture secondary platforms

Alongside the institutional market, a separate category of platforms has emerged targeting pre-IPO venture shares specifically. Forge Global and Hiive are the two most active. Both operate as broker-dealers connecting buyers and sellers of shares in private, venture-backed companies. Forge provides pricing data on over 60 late-stage companies and allows direct transactions in pre-IPO stock. Hiive functions more like a stock exchange, displaying real-time bid and ask prices from verified participants.

The volume on these platforms is concentrated. According to PitchBook data cited by Fortune, the top 20 companies on Hiive accounted for 86.4% of all secondary trading value in Q4 2025. The top five, primarily OpenAI and SpaceX, accounted for 55.6% of that volume alone. The market for pre-IPO shares exists in meaningful size for a very small number of the most prominent companies. For the long tail of venture-backed startups, liquidity through these channels remains limited.

Access is also restricted. Forge requires a minimum of $100,000 for direct transactions. Both platforms limit participation to accredited investors, meaning the same income and net worth thresholds that have historically gated private market access apply here too.

Why it is growing regardless

The growth of secondary markets reflects a deeper change in how private companies are financed and how long they stay private. Companies are taking longer to reach IPO or acquisition. The average time from founding to public listing has stretched from four years in the early 2000s to over a decade today. That extended timeline creates mounting liquidity pressure for everyone involved: early employees sitting on equity grants they cannot spend, venture funds that have returned little cash to their own investors, and founders who want to allow early backers to exit without forcing the whole company through a public offering.

Secondary markets solve that problem without requiring an IPO. They allow partial liquidity (a founder sells 10% of their stake, an early employee converts some equity to cash) while the company stays private and continues operating on its own terms. GP-led continuation vehicles, in which a fund manager transfers assets to a new vehicle and offers original investors the choice to cash out or roll over, now represent roughly 14% of all sponsor-backed exit volume, even as traditional M&A and IPO activity have recovered somewhat.

Apollo's April 2026 research note estimated that at 20% annual growth, the secondary market could reach $500 billion or more by 2030. Even at that scale, it would still represent only about 2% of total private market assets, suggesting the market has significant structural room to expand.

What this means for early-stage investors

The secondary market being built today is almost entirely institutional. The platforms that handle pre-IPO venture shares require accredited investor status at minimum. The fund-level secondary market, buying stakes in PE funds from other LPs, is largely inaccessible below seven-figure minimums.

For investors in Reg CF deals, a formal secondary market for crowdfunded equity shares is still early. Several platforms have explored solutions, and the SEC's current regulatory review of private market access includes secondary liquidity as a live question. The infrastructure does not yet exist at scale for the early-stage retail investor.

What does exist is the precedent. The secondary market grew from a niche institutional workaround into a $226 billion ecosystem because the underlying need, getting liquidity out of illiquid assets before a formal exit, is real and persistent. Early-stage investors face the same need. The question is whether the infrastructure will follow.

What to watch next

• Jefferies H1 2026 secondary market volume report: whether the projected $100 billion first-half figure holds.
• EQT's integration of Coller Capital: the $3.7 billion acquisition signals how seriously the largest PE firms are treating secondaries as a permanent asset class.
• Forge and Hiive trading volumes as SpaceX and OpenAI approach public listings: what happens to pre-IPO secondary demand once the IPO window opens.
• SEC rulemaking on secondary market access for retail and Reg CF investors, part of the broader retailization conversation currently underway.
• Nasdaq Private Market and any moves toward lower minimum transaction sizes for venture secondaries.