The Secondaries Decade

Why Liquidity Itself Is Becoming an Asset Class

Earlier this year, when Anthropic offered current and former employees the ability to sell shares through a tender process of up to $6 billion, the transaction priced against a valuation of roughly $350 billion. A meaningful number of employees chose not to sell. By early April, as the process was closing, Anthropic had disclosed that run-rate revenue had surpassed $30 billion, up from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025. Within weeks, Bloomberg reported that institutional investors were circling the company at an implied valuation of more than $800 billion. On Forge, the secondary trading platform, according to subsequent reporting, the indicative secondary mark crossed $1 trillion. The employees who held back were holding shares valued at nearly three times the tender price.

The arithmetic is striking; a $650 billion spread between the company's own tender price and what the open market implied, but the more important observation is structural. This is a demonstration of how price formation in private markets has fundamentally changed, and of why the mechanisms that govern access to that price formation have become some of the most consequential questions in asset allocation.

The secondary market for private company shares is no longer a peripheral instrument used by distressed sellers or impatient early investors. It has become the primary venue through which late-stage private companies manage their valuations, distribute liquidity to employees, and cultivate the institutional relationships that will define their eventual public debut. The tender offer, the continuation vehicle, the structured secondary: these are the instruments through which the modern private market prices time itself. And the gap between who can access that pricing and who cannot is widening.

The Mechanics of a Managed Market

To understand why tender offers produce marks that diverge so dramatically from where the same assets trade in the open secondary market, it helps to examine the structure of the transaction itself. When a private company runs a tender offer, it selects the pool of eligible sellers, typically current and former employees, and perhaps early investors; and it selects or approves the buyer pool, typically institutional investors with whom it has existing relationships. The price is negotiated between parties who share substantial common interest: the company wants a mark that is defensible without being so high that it deters participation, and the lead investors writing the cheques often already hold significant positions and therefore benefit from a controlled re-rating rather than a competitive auction.

The same institutionalisation is visible across the broader secondaries market. According to Nasdaq Private Market's 2026 annual report, GP-led secondary volume reached $47 billion in the first half of 2025 alone, up 68 percent year on year, while LP-led volume hit $56 billion over the same period, up 40 percent. Secondary dry powder stood at $315 billion against approximately $210 billion in expected annual volume, meaning capital is accumulating faster than assets are coming to market. Over 150 sponsors have now executed repeat continuation vehicle transactions, and GP-led transactions now match or exceed LP-led secondary volume in certain quarters. What was once a liquidity mechanism of last resort has become a core instrument of portfolio management for the most sophisticated players in private capital.

In the secondaries decade, value is increasingly being built while companies remain private. By the time they reach the public market, much of the value creation may already have happened.

Companies That Stay Private on Purpose

The drift in median IPO age is one of the more revealing data points available on the structural shift in private markets. Technology companies that went public in 2025 had a median age of 12 years, compared with four to five years at the peak of the dot-com cycle. The companies that remain private longest are, in the main, those with the most sophisticated secondary programmes, the deepest institutional support, and the greatest ability to manage their valuations between transactions. Extended private life is not a symptom of companies being unable to list. It is a consequence of them having found a more favourable arrangement.

The structure of that arrangement is worth describing clearly. A company that runs a well-managed secondary programme can provide employees with liquidity, signal institutional confidence through carefully selected buyer participation, move the mark at a moment of its choosing, and defer the disclosure requirements, governance scrutiny and quarterly earnings pressure of public markets for as long as the secondary market can absorb demand. In 2025, tender volumes alone reached $35 billion, against IPO volumes of approximately $45 billion, a ratio that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. The secondary market has not replaced the IPO as a liquidity mechanism, but it has become a genuine alternative for the companies most capable of leveraging it, which are precisely the companies that institutional investors most want to access.

The trickle-down of the instrument is also significant. Nearly half of the tender programmes run by Nasdaq Private Market in 2025 were for Series A, B and C companies, compared with 30 percent two years earlier. The managed secondary is no longer exclusively the preserve of pre-IPO giants with billion-dollar employee equity programmes. It is becoming a standard tool of private capital management across the growth cycle, which means the gap between internal and external pricing, and between participants and non-participants, begins earlier and compounds over a longer period.

The secondary market is no longer a release valve for distressed sellers. It has become the architecture of modern private capital.

Liquidity as the Underlying Asset

There is a way of thinking about all of this that clarifies what is actually being bought and sold in modern private markets. The traditional fund model priced time as an externality: you committed capital, bore the illiquidity for however long the investment period required, and received the exit at whatever multiple the market happened to produce at that moment. The J-curve was the cost of the strategy, and liquidity was the binary outcome of a successful exit rather than a variable that could be managed, timed or sold independently.

That model has been superseded, at least for assets of sufficient scale and institutional interest. What secondary markets now price, transaction by transaction, is access to a company's equity at a specific moment in its development, before the next re-rating, before the next managed tender, before the IPO at which the valuation will have already been set through a decade of private negotiation. The right to hold that position at that moment has a price, and that price; shaped by the 9:1 demand imbalance, by the scarcity of paper relative to institutional appetite, by the performance differential between the Forge Private Market Index and the S&P, is what secondary markets are discovering and compounding.

What the Spread in Your Portfolio Is Telling You

Every investor holding private assets is implicitly holding a position on the spread between the last mark they accepted and what the open market would pay today. That spread is sometimes favourable, as the Anthropic employees who declined the tender discovered, and sometimes it runs in the other direction, as investors who marked aggressively in 2021 found when the same assets traded at 60 to 70 cents on the dollar through the secondary market in 2022 and 2023. Nasdaq Private Market data for 2025 shows the average venture secondary pricing at 78 percent of NAV, which means the mark you hold and the price you could clear remain systematically different numbers across the asset class, not just in exceptional cases.

The decade ahead in private markets will belong to those who can position before the tender rather than at it, who can read the distance between a company's managed mark and its true secondary price, and who have the access and the infrastructure to participate in the transactions where that gap closes. Those transactions are becoming more frequent, more sophisticated and more broadly distributed across the maturity spectrum of private capital. The Forge Private Market Index returning 95% in a year when the S&P returned 18% is not a statistical accident. It is a measure of how much value is now being created and captured inside the private market pricing mechanism, before the rest of the market is invited to participate.

Food for Thought

For most of the modern capital markets era, the IPO was treated as the moment of arrival. It was where a company became visible, where the public market discovered its price, and where years of private risk were finally translated into realised gain.

That sequence is changing.

In the secondaries decade, value is increasingly built while companies remain private. By the time they reach the public market, much of the upside may already have been captured by the investors with the access, timing and infrastructure to participate before the bell rings.

This does not make the IPO irrelevant. It makes it different. The listing becomes less the beginning of price discovery than the public confirmation of a valuation path already shaped through private rounds, employee tenders, structured secondaries and institutional negotiations. The market still opens the doors. It may simply be opening them later.

For allocators, that shift carries a quiet but important implication. The question is no longer only which companies will compound. It is when that compounding is still available to be owned.

Because liquidity used to be the end of the story. Increasingly, it is where the story is being written.

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