The secondaries market for private assets is an important element of liquidity and price efficiency. A panel

After the Family Wealth Report Family Office Investment Forum, held earlier this month in New York City, we continue to carry reports of the panel discussions of the major themes. In the following account, panelists looked at private market “secondaries” – i.e. buying and selling pre-existing private investment stakes. Secondaries are an important way for the market to achieve more liquidity. 

Maxime Seguineau, founder and managing partner of Raido Capital Partners, was the moderator for the panel. She was joined by Kelly Han, investor, The Gate Technologies Capital, and Will Snape, who is co-founder and head of capital formation, OPEN VC.

Venture secondaries have moved from a niche liquidity tool to a central part of private market structure. As companies stay private longer and traditional exit pathways prove less reliable than they once were, secondaries have become the mechanism that keeps capital, ownership, and incentives moving through the system.

That shift was at the heart of our recent discussion at the Family Wealth Report Forum in New York on April 9. 2026. Our panel of investment professionals discussed how to use secondaries to build positions in attractive private companies. Our conversation was not about whether the market matters anymore. That question has largely been answered by scale. 

Industry Ventures estimates that the global venture secondary market surpassed roughly $120 billion in 2025, while Carta reports $61.1 billion in VC secondary transaction value over the 12 months ending June 2025.

The more relevant questions now are where the best opportunities sit, how investors should underwrite them, and why specialization is becoming more important as the market institutionalizes.

Secondaries have become a core liquidity channel
The secondary market exists to transfer ownership of already-issued shares from one holder to another. In venture-backed companies, that can mean employees selling stock, early investors taking liquidity, funds repositioning portfolios, or LPs selling fund interests before a portfolio fully matures. Our panelists noted that these transactions now span direct secondaries, tender offers, GP-led deals, and fund interests, reflecting a much broader and more structured market than many investors still assume.

What changed is not just the form of transactions, but their importance. The venture ecosystem has stretched in duration. Companies that once might have exited sooner now can remain private for longer, often with substantial private financing support.

Panelists described this dynamic clearly: the surge in primary venture fundraising allowed companies to defer the public markets, which in turn increased the need for alternative liquidity options for employees and investors.

That is why secondaries increasingly function as a release valve. They provide a way of returning liquidity to early stakeholders without forcing a company into an IPO or sale before it is ready. 

They also give new investors another path into strong companies when primary allocations are limited or unavailable. In that sense, secondaries are no longer just a workaround. 

They are becoming part of the normal operating architecture of private markets. 

The rise of secondaries reflects a deeper market reality
A market does not scale toward $120 billion globally unless it is responding to a real structural need. In venture, that need is straightforward: more shareholders are waiting longer for liquidity, and more capital is locked in assets that do not yet have natural exit windows. 

As I noted on the panel, Industry Ventures explicitly links the growth of the market to the continued lack of exits from IPOs and M&A, which has created a backlog of shareholders and LPs seeking liquidity.

This is an important distinction. The growth of secondaries should not be interpreted simply as a symptom of stress. It is also a sign of maturation. As private markets grow in size and complexity, ownership transfer mechanisms become more necessary, not less. A more developed private market should have multiple paths for liquidity, including structured secondary transactions.

That said, growth alone does not make the market easy. The private secondary market remains fundamentally different from public markets. Our panelists agreed that there is no centralized infrastructure, limited standardization of disclosures, negotiated pricing, and sometimes very little information provided to prospective buyers. Those frictions make the market more opaque, but they also create the conditions for differentiated underwriting.

The market is larger, but attention is concentrated
One of the most important ideas in the panel discussion was that growth in the market does not mean opportunity is evenly distributed. In practice, a disproportionate amount of investor attention tends to concentrate around a relatively small group of highly visible private companies. Those names often attract the deepest buyer interest, the most broker activity, and the strongest signaling effects from prior financings or public comparables.

That dynamic matters because crowded demand can narrow the opportunity set. When too many buyers pursue the same names, pricing can become more efficient, seller expectations rise, and the margin for error shrinks. The result is a paradox: the companies that feel safest or most familiar may not always offer the most compelling entry points. In a negotiated market, popularity can work against return potential.

This is where the conversation becomes more nuanced. The right takeaway is not that well-known companies should be avoided categorically. It is that investors need to distinguish between quality and crowding. A great company can still be a poor trade if pricing already reflects consensus enthusiasm. In a market with fragmented supply, uneven information, and bespoke transaction processes, the best risk-adjusted opportunities often emerge where fewer people are looking with discipline.

Why the real opportunity may sit beyond the obvious names
That leads to what may have been the central thesis of the panel: alpha in venture secondaries may increasingly come from going one layer deeper. Rather than focusing only on the most obvious private “blue chips,” investors may find better opportunities in the broader universe of high-quality companies that are institutionally relevant but less crowded.

This idea matters for several reasons. First, outside the top tier of heavily trafficked names, there may be more pricing dispersion. Second, seller motivation may be more varied and less intermediated. Third, buyer competition may be lower, allowing disciplined investors to underwrite with less pressure to overpay. None of that guarantees superior returns, but it does create the possibility of finding mispricing in ways that are harder to achieve in the most consensus-driven trades.

The distinction is subtle but important. The opportunity is not necessarily in lower quality. It is in better selectivity. In other words, access by itself is not an edge. Differentiated access to the right opportunities, paired with disciplined underwriting and patience, is the real edge.

For many allocators, that is a useful reframing. The question is no longer simply whether to allocate to venture secondaries. It is whether a manager has the sourcing network, pricing discipline, and structural expertise to find value outside the most obvious market hotspots.

Execution is where the category gets interesting
If venture secondaries were easy to underwrite, the market would likely be more efficient than it is. What makes the category compelling is precisely what makes it difficult. Buyers are not just evaluating a company. They are evaluating a transaction. That starts with structure. Even when two transactions appear similar on the surface, their legal and economic realities can be meaningfully different.

Then there is the question of access and mechanics. Private companies may have transfer restrictions, rights of first refusal, consent requirements, or other governance features that affect execution. In some cases, information may be limited or highly asymmetrical. In others, pricing may be shaped as much by seller urgency as by company fundamentals. The panelists noted that negotiated pricing and inconsistent disclosures are defining features of the private secondary market, and that means buyer judgment matters enormously.

This is why a sophisticated secondary investor must underwrite more than headline company quality. The real diligence framework also includes who is selling, why they are selling, what rights attach to the shares, how the transaction gets approved, what the likely path to liquidity looks like, and whether the purchase price properly reflects all of those variables. The best investors in this space do not just source supply. They convert complexity into informed decisions.

As the market institutionalizes, specialization matters more
A common assumption is that when a market grows, edge becomes less dependent on specialization. In venture secondaries, the opposite may be true. As the category attracts more capital and more participants, the premium on real expertise may rise.

That is because larger markets do not automatically become simpler. They often become more competitive in the obvious areas while remaining structurally complex in the less obvious ones. As more buyers enter the space, crowded trades become even more crowded. The edge then shifts toward investors who can navigate the hard parts better: sourcing overlooked opportunities, understanding transaction structure, evaluating seller context, and maintaining pricing discipline.

For allocators, that puts manager selection at the center of the discussion. Exposure to the category alone is not enough. The more important question is what kind of exposure one is getting, through what process, and with what underwriting framework. In a market where the same headline company can trade at different implied values depending on seller, timing, rights, and process, strategy design matters as much as market access.

That might have been the most durable takeaway from our conversation. 

Institutionalization does not eliminate alpha. It changes where alpha lives. In venture secondaries, that increasingly means specialization over generalization, process over momentum, and disciplined access over broad enthusiasm.

About the panelists.
Maxime Seguineau is a financial entrepreneur and private investor with expertise across capital markets, technology, and alternative investments. He is MP at Raido Capital Partners, which he co-founded to back financial software and AI-enabled services firms with structured growth equity. Previously, Seguineau was managing director at Seaport Global, where he co-founded and led Axegine, an AI-driven systematic credit hedge fund. He also served as a credit portfolio manager at Millennium Management and was the CEO and founder of Antepo, a real-time collaboration startup he sold to Adobe. Seguineau sits on the board of Sterling Trading Technology and he holds degrees from University of Chicago (MBA), Bocconi University (MS), as well as Sciences Po (BS), and is a CAIA Charterholder.

Will Snape is a co-founder and the head of capital formation at OPEN VC. In his current role, Snape oversees the entire lifecycle of capital deployment, from deal origination to managing sophisticated relationships with General Partners (GPs) and portfolio company leadership. Prior to co-founding OPEN VC, Snape spent his career in tech, most recently at Google and previously in a leadership capacity at an AI startup. Snape holds a BA in urban studies and formal organizations from Trinity College-Hartford.

Kelly Han is an investor at The Gate Technologies Capital, a New York–based direct tech secondaries firm, spun out of and anchored by a family office. Han holds a BA from the University of Chicago.