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Caplight
Caplight operates a secondary-market data and trading platform that tracked over $706M in venture-capital secondaries in H1 2024.
Caplight
Caplight operates a data and trading platform purpose-built for the venture-capital secondary market. Its company database covers 25,000-plus private firms from seed stage onward, with funding-round history, growth signals, and business-model tagging, while an investor database profiles over 50,000 global institutional buyers and sellers with contact data and lead-partner relationships. The firm publishes a proprietary MarketPrice model that major financial institutions use to gauge where the next secondary transaction will price. The platform aggregates over $5 billion of live buy-and-sell interest and connects counterparties through what it describes as the world's largest network of institutional brokers. Caplight tracks secondary-implied valuations on widely held unicorn stakes: in mid-2024 its data showed that more than four-fifths of unicorns were trading below their last primary round, a figure cited by The Economist. Coverage spans late-stage companies across North America, Europe, and Asia, with visible trading activity in names that include Stripe, SpaceX, ByteDance, Klarna, Canva, Ramp, Anduril, and Neuralink. Caplight Markets LLC, the regulated broker-dealer affiliate, is a FINRA and SIPC member, enabling the firm to facilitate securities transactions. The Wall Street Journal reported that Caplight's platform saw a 27 percent quarterly rise in transactions during 2024, and the Financial Times noted that secondary volume tracked by the firm grew more than 50 percent year-over-year through May. Its tooling, which serves traditional VC funds, dedicated secondary funds, and general asset managers, folds market surveillance, counterparty matching, and workflow automation into a single interface. Caplight's structural distinction lies in being both a data vendor and a regulated execution venue for the same asset class — a plumbing-level position that turns every trade quote on a private company into a pricing signal its analytics product can repackage for the broader market. Unlike a conventional exchange, the firm does not custody assets or run a matching engine for order-book settlement; it operates as a technology layer interposed between broker-mediated voice trading and the fast-institutionalizing demand for private-company liquidity.
General information
Firm type
Asset Manager
Year founded
—
AUM
Undisclosed
Location
Region
North America
Country
United States
City
—
Corporate office
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Sector focus
Frequently asked questions
How does Caplight source its pricing and transaction data?
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.
Is Caplight a broker-dealer, a data vendor, or both?
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.
What is the scale of Caplight's trading activity?
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.
Which companies are most actively priced on Caplight?
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.
What is Caplight's relationship with venture capital firms and secondary funds?
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.
How is Caplight's valuation data used by the broader financial press?
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.
Does Caplight participate in fund commitments or invest directly?
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.
Profile maintained by Altss using OSINT (open-source intelligence), regulatory filings, licensed data partners, and verified direct submissions. Read the methodology. Last updated: . Continuous refresh with full update cycles at least every 30 days.
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