Caplight

Caplight gathers pricing data directly from the secondary transactions that occur on its institutional trading platform and through broker relationships. The firm's MarketPrice model synthesizes live buy-and-sell indications, recent trade prints, and order-flow patterns to estimate where the next secondary transaction for a given company is likely to clear. Because Caplight itself is a venue, its pricing data reflects actual negotiated liquidity rather than scraped or crowd-sourced estimates.

It is both. Caplight Technologies, Inc. operates the software platform and data products, while Caplight Markets LLC is a registered broker-dealer, a member of FINRA and SIPC, and handles the securities transactions on the platform. This dual structure allows the firm to facilitate trades and simultaneously capture proprietary transaction-level data that feeds its analytics business.

Caplight disclosed that it recorded more than $706 million in direct secondary deals in the first half of 2024, as cited by TechCrunch in August 2024. The platform also carries over $5 billion of live buy-and-sell interest across late-stage venture-backed companies at any given time, with transaction volume rising 27% quarter-over-quarter according to Wall Street Journal reporting in 2024.

Caplight's website prominently features live pricing for late-stage unicorns including Stripe, SpaceX, ByteDance, Klarna, Canva, Ramp, Anduril, Neuralink, Scale AI, and Swiggy. Because secondary pricing is quote driven, activity concentrates in names where pre-IPO shareholder bases are large enough to generate consistent liquidity — such as decacorn enterprise-software and consumer-tech companies.

Caplight serves as a neutral intermediary: secondary funds, traditional VCs, and asset managers all use the platform to either source deal flow or track portfolio-company valuations. Buyers can monitor live offers and connect with vetted counterparties; sellers, often early employees or seed-stage investors seeking liquidity, gain access to an institutional broker network. Caplight does not operate as a fund and does not take principal positions on the platform.

The firm's data is regularly cited by The Economist, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, and The Information. For instance, The Economist relied on Caplight data in 2024 to report that more than four-fifths of unicorns were trading at a secondary-market discount to their last primary funding round, and The Information used Caplight figures to track how institutional investors such as BlackRock and Fidelity marked their private-company stakes.

Caplight is a market-infrastructure company: it provides a brokerage and data platform for secondary-market participants but does not manage a fund or take balance-sheet positions in the companies listed on its venue. The firm's incentives are aligned with transaction volume and data-subscription growth, not with investment performance of any underlying asset.