Mountain View, CA – July 14, 2026 – Something fundamental is being rebuilt in how markets work.
In about a year, the machinery of trading has raced toward a more continuous and accessible model. Secondary transactions in private companies hit a record in 2025. The Texas Stock Exchange, the most heavily capitalized new exchange to reach the SEC in decades, will begin trading in Dallas this month. And the SEC has cleared both NYSE Arca and Nasdaq to extend toward near-around-the-clock trading. These are not separate stories. The market is being re-engineered around two ideas: that price discovery should be continuous, and that access should be broad.
The catch
All of that sophistication sits on top of one thing public markets have always had and private markets never have: a live, trusted price. You will soon be able to trade a public share at three in the morning from anywhere in the world. You still cannot say what the private company down the street is worth on any given Tuesday.
That gap is no longer academic. Global private capital stands at roughly $13 trillion. Companies stay private for a decade or more, which means more capital, employees, and investors are locked into assets with no continuous price than ever before. The infrastructure for trading private stakes has sprinted ahead of the infrastructure for pricing them.
That is the real frontier. Not another venue. Not longer hours. A live price for the assets that do not have one. And liquidity alone does not solve it: without price discovery, a private trade is just negotiation in the dark, where one uninformed number becomes the reference everyone else has to explain.
The pricing layer
This is one of the reasons why we invested in Eqvista.
Eqvista is building the pricing layer for private companies. Its Real-Time Company Valuation product does for a private business what a ticker does for a public one: a continuously updated view of what the company is worth, drawn from its own financials, cap table, and market conditions, rather than a report that is stale before the ink dries.
What drove our conviction was the foundation underneath it. This is not a thin model on scraped data. Eqvista runs an in-house team of NACVA-certified analysts, is registered with the SEC as a transfer agent, and has completed more than 8,000 valuations across 25,000 companies and roughly $4 trillion in assets valued. Real price discovery takes real valuation expertise at scale, and they spent years building it before turning it into infrastructure. Around it sits the rest of the stack a company needs: a free cap table from incorporation, unlimited audit-defensible 409As, and funding-round and waterfall modeling.
For founders, the takeaway is simpler than the market structure behind it. Value is becoming something you monitor, not something you commission when a deal appears. Set up a clean cap table before it gets complicated, model your round before you negotiate it, keep your 409A current, and know what your equity is worth as you grow. We encourage every early-stage founder we work with to build that habit, and Eqvista makes it realistic from day one.
The frontier
The public markets are being rebuilt around continuous, accessible price discovery. The private markets, now the faster-growing frontier of the two, are where that capability is still missing. The next $13 trillion will run on a pricing layer that does not fully exist yet. We backed Eqvista because we think they will define this category.
