05
The 2026 State of the Pre-IPO Market
The year the private market stopped being an anteroom. Secondary volume reached institutional scale, tender offers became the default liquidity event, and Wall Street bought the infrastructure.
Street Research, July 2026. Every figure verified against primary sources; conflicting claims excluded.
01
The market reached scale
PitchBook estimates $106.3 billion traded across US VC secondaries in 2025, within reach of the year's entire public-listing exit value of $119.6 billion.
02
The tender replaced the IPO
OpenAI's $6.6 billion October tender alone was 6.2 percent of the year's secondary transaction value. The company-led window is now the default liquidity event.
03
Twelve years to a listing
Companies reach the public market at a median age of twelve years, roughly twice the late-1990s level, and 2025 produced 90 operating-company IPOs against 1,404 waiting unicorns.
04
Twenty names carry the tape
The twenty most-traded names accounted for 86.4 percent of fourth-quarter secondary value; the top five, 55.6 percent.
05
Wall Street bought in
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Charles Schwab each agreed to buy a private-market platform within a single four-month window.
06
Settlement is the choke point
The largest tender venue settled direct secondary transfers for 31 issuers in all of 2025, out of 1,404 unicorns.
05
The exit bottleneck is structural, not cyclical: fewer, older companies reach a public price.
The Bottleneck
The United States produced 311 operating-company IPOs in 2021. In 2025 it produced 90, a partial recovery from the 2022 trough of 38, but still less than a third of the peak and below the 1980 to 2025 average of roughly 203 listings a year. The public company itself is a shrinking population: from more than 8,000 US listings in 1996 to just over 4,000 today.
Twelve years is a working career. An engineer who joined a 2014-vintage company at Series B has, by 2026, waited longer for a listing than the entire dot-com cycle lasted, and 48.5 percent of today’s unicorns raised their first venture round in 2016 or earlier. The equity is real, the valuations are real, and the owners are still waiting.
01
Ninety listings a year
Offer price of five dollars or more; SPACs, ADRs, REITs and closed-end funds excluded. 2025 alone had 144 SPACs on top of this count, which is why headline IPO figures disagree. On the operating-company definition the market recovered to 90, against a forty-five-year average of 203.
- 1 Peak of the window, 311 offerings, 2021
- 2 Trough, 38 offerings, 2022
- 3 Partial recovery, 90 offerings, 2025
US operating-company IPOs by year, 2019 to 2025
- 1 Peak of the window, 311 offerings, 2021
- 2 Trough, 38 offerings, 2022
- 3 Partial recovery, 90 offerings, 2025
02
Twelve years old at the gate
The 2001 to 2025 cohort median is eleven years; 1999 to 2000 was five. Proceeds tell the same story from the other side: $39 billion raised in 2025 matches 2019’s total on far fewer, far older companies. The growth phase, the years in which most of the value is created, now happens before the listing.
- 1 Five years, 1999
- 2 Thirteen years, 2024
- 3 Twelve years, 2025
Median company age at IPO, selected years
- 1 Five years, 1999
- 2 Thirteen years, 2024
- 3 Twelve years, 2025
Liquidity Moved Private
Liquidity did not wait for the listing window to reopen. PitchBook estimates $106.3 billion of total US VC secondary value traded in 2025: a $91.7 billion midpoint for direct secondaries, modeled range $62.5 to $120.9 billion, plus $14.6 billion in GP-led transactions. For scale, all US VC-backed public listings in 2025 returned $119.6 billion. The secondary market now moves nearly as much value in a year as the IPO market it substitutes for.
Two methodological notes keep this honest. Platform figures are self-reported and unaudited, and the modeled total sits atop them with a wide range. The market’s older size estimates, Industry Ventures’ well-known $100 billion and $130 billion figures, are total-addressable-market numbers, not closed volume, and are not comparable to the transaction data below.
01
Nearly the size of the exit market
Beneath the modeled total sits $24.8 billion of directly verified platform and broker volume, the auditable core of the market. The rest is modeled from it. Even the verified core alone would have ranked among the largest liquidity channels available to venture-backed companies a decade ago.
- 1 US VC secondary value traded, 2025
- 2 All US VC-backed public-listing exit value, 2025
- 3 Verified on-platform core of the secondary total
US VC secondary value against public-listing exit value, 2025
- 1 US VC secondary value traded, 2025
- 2 All US VC-backed public-listing exit value, 2025
- 3 Verified on-platform core of the secondary total
02
Six venues carry the verified core
The six largest venues account for $22.4 billion of the verified total, and the largest of them, Nasdaq Private Market, carries more than the next five combined. Concentration is the market’s defining trait at every layer: of venues, of buyers, and, as the next part shows, of the names being traded.
Verified platform and broker secondary volume, 2025
05
The company-led tender, issuer-sanctioned, price-set and window-limited, became the defining liquidity event.
The Tender Era
The defining liquidity instrument of 2025 was the company-led tender: issuer-sanctioned, price-set, window-limited. The largest ran at a scale no private transaction had reached before, and beneath the landmarks a long tail of programs, Whatnot, Notion, Vercel, ElevenLabs, Plaid, Armis, Faire, Clay, Temporal, Hightouch, ran documented tenders or employee sales. Databricks closed a Series L of more than $4 billion at $134 billion in December, earmarked in part for employee liquidity.
And the market these events trade in is intensely top-heavy: per the Hiive50 index, the twenty most-traded names carried 86.4 percent of fourth-quarter secondary value, the top five 55.6 percent.
01
The landmark windows
OpenAI’s $6.6 billion October window, completed at a $500 billion valuation, accounted for 6.2 percent of the entire year’s secondary transaction value on its own. SpaceX’s per-share price doubled between its July and December windows, $212 to $421. Ramp ran two windows in one year; Rippling one.
Landmark company-led tenders, 2025
02
What a window costs a seller
A holder who sold in the July 2025 window realized half the price of the December window, and a quarter of the June 2026 listing. That spread, the cost of illiquidity and opaque price discovery, is the clearest argument in this report for continuous, issuer-approved markets over episodic tender windows.
The January 2026 mark is a modeled secondary price, not a printed trade, and the February figure reflects the SpaceX and xAI combination.
- 1 July 2025 window, $212 per share
- 2 December 2025 window, $421 per share
- 3 Public listing, June 2026, near $1.75T
SpaceX, private mark to public listing, billions
- 1 July 2025 window, $212 per share
- 2 December 2025 window, $421 per share
- 3 Public listing, June 2026, near $1.75T
Wall St Bought the Rails
In a single four-month window, three of the largest names in American finance each agreed to acquire a private-market platform, the clearest institutional endorsement the asset class has received. Goldman Sachs agreed to acquire Industry Ventures in October. Charles Schwab agreed to acquire Forge Global for about $660 million in November. Morgan Stanley agreed to acquire EquityZen in late 2025, and in January Nasdaq Private Market partnered with G Squared for priority tender access.
Capital formation followed: dedicated US venture-secondary dry powder reached $11.8 billion by mid-2025, up 2.8 times since 2022, yet still just 3.9 percent of primary VC capital. The constraint is no longer demand or dedicated capital. It is plumbing.
The rails
GPT Image 2
01
Settlement is the choke point
Nasdaq Private Market’s Transfer and Settlement desk, the market’s largest tender venue, settled $673 million of secondary trades across 31 issuers in 2025, up from $372 million across 12 the year before.
Read those numbers against the $106.3 billion total. In a hundred-billion-dollar market, direct issuer-approved transfer settled well under one percent of value, across 31 companies, out of 1,404 unicorns. Almost everything else still moves through episodic tenders, brokered blocks and SPV wrappers. The market found its demand. It has not yet built its exchange layer.
Direct transfer and settlement at the largest tender venue
Watching in 2026
Three questions decide what the private market looks like at the end of 2026, and none of them is whether demand exists.
The reopening window.
The first quarter of 2026 was the strongest opening quarter for US traditional IPOs in five years, 22 deals and $9.4 billion raised, capped by SpaceX’s June listing. But 17 unicorn IPOs against a 1,404-name backlog is not an exit market; it is a lottery. PwC counts $4.3 trillion still private, and venture remains in its fourth consecutive year of negative net cash flow to limited partners.
The access debate.
Washington spent 2025 pushing private markets toward wider audiences: an August executive order directing regulators to reexamine alternative assets in retirement plans, an SEC investor-advisory recommendation on private-market access, and a public standoff over tokenized shares of private companies after issuers disavowed them. The direction of travel is broader access; the fight is over the rails it happens on.
The infrastructure race.
With Schwab, Goldman and Morgan Stanley absorbing the first generation of platforms, 2026 decides what the second generation looks like: episodic tender software bolted onto wealth management, or genuine market structure, with issuer-governed rulesets, continuous books, and settlement that writes to the shareholder record. That second path is the one Street is building.
The market found its demand. It has not yet built its exchange layer.
Why every market ends up with one is the subject of our mission document. Every Market Begins in the Street.
- 1. PitchBook, 2025 Annual US VC Secondary Market Watch, February 2026; modeled direct-secondary range $62.5B to $120.9B plus $14.6B GP-led, over $24.8B of verified platform and broker volume.
- 2. Jay R. Ritter, University of Florida, IPO Statistics and Age at IPO tables, March to April 2026; operating-company definition, offer price of five dollars or more, excluding SPACs, ADRs, REITs and closed-end funds.
- 3. Nasdaq Private Market, Secondary Scene: 2026 Outlook, March 2026; Transfer and Settlement desk figures, self-reported.
- 4. Caplight, 2025 Secondary Market Update; SpaceX MarketPrice, January 2026, a modeled secondary mark, not a printed trade.
- 5. PwC, US Capital Markets Watch, first quarter 2026; 22 traditional IPOs, $9.4B raised; $4.3 trillion of unicorn value still private.
- 6. CB Insights, Unicorn Tracker, March 2026; 1,404 private unicorns, about $7.4 trillion aggregate value; tracker methodologies differ and Crunchbase counts run higher.
- 7. CNBC, October 2, 2025; Bloomberg and Reuters, December 13, 2025; tender-offer reporting on OpenAI and SpaceX; Ramp November size PitchBook-estimated.
- 8. Hiive, Hiive50 index, fourth quarter 2025; concentration of secondary value by name.
- 9. Databricks, Series L press release, December 16, 2025; more than $4 billion at a $134 billion valuation, earmarked in part for employee liquidity.
- 10. Goldman Sachs and Industry Ventures, October 2025; Charles Schwab and Forge Global, about $660 million, November 2025; Morgan Stanley and EquityZen, late 2025; Nasdaq Private Market and G Squared, January 2026.
- 11. The White House, executive order on alternative assets in defined-contribution plans, August 2025; SEC Investor Advisory Committee recommendation on private-market access, September 2025.
Published by Street Labs. For informational purposes only; not an offer, solicitation, or investment advice. Company names and marks are cited as factual reporting; no affiliation or endorsement is implied.