Secondary Market Access to Pre-IPO Unicorns with Forge

Samvit Ramadurgam is the Co-Founder & President and Kelly Rodriques is the CEO of Forge, a secondary market for private shares.

Forge provides access to shares of virtually all of the top 50 privately held tech startups, including Slack and many more, and offered trading in the likes of Spotify, Dropbox, Snap and DocuSign before they IPOed. According to Crunchbase, Forge has raised $88.5m from investors including Peter Thiel, Tim Draper, FT Partnersand others.

Unlike earlier players in the space, Forge has focused on building out a robust technology platform, including institutional grade clearing and custody infrastructure to support global counterparties.

Forge’s proposition is particularly relevant as companies stay private for longer. More investor value is captured pre-IPO, so access to private shares is important. Additionally, because IPOs happen later, early employees are often unable to access liquidity for years, making it difficult to buy homes or diversify risk.

We dig into all of these issues with Samvit and Kelly.