Catchlight Capital Partners

Catchlight Capital Partners

Catchlight Capital Partners was established in 2020 by Greg Back and Wei Jiang, two investors who brought cross-border fluency and decades of collective technology experience to the U.S. venture secondary market. Rather than building a generalist venture platform, they constructed a firm purpose-built for structured liquidity solutions during periods of market stress. The team of seven professionals operates from New York, targeting transactions where existing shareholders — including institutional investors, employees, and early limited partners — need to exit before a traditional IPO or M&A path materializes. The firm deploys capital through direct secondary investments, structured liquidity solutions, and selective primary participations, concentrating on mid-stage U.S. technology companies with proven business models and durable growth. Catchlight targets a broad technology mandate spanning enterprise software, fintech, digital health, and AI/ML sectors. The portfolio includes over 50 active positions built through disciplined sourcing and underwriting. The firm's investment posture relies on creating alignment across three parties — the company, the selling shareholder, and Catchlight — a structure the firm describes as a "Win-Win-Win" mandate that avoids adversarial zero-sum negotiations typical of distressed secondary purchases. Since inception, Catchlight has assembled a team whose listed leadership includes Greg Back and Wei Jiang as Founders and Managing Partners, supported by Venture Partners Tom Cole, Lee Fan, and Bryan Finkel, along with Investors Jackson Polveri and Caroline Zhang. The firm cites a combined track record of multiple decades across both technology investing and operating experience. Unlike family offices or single-LP vehicles, Catchlight operates as an independent private equity manager raising external capital through active funds, positioning itself as a specialist in an under-resourced segment of the venture lifecycle that sits between early-stage growth equity and traditional late-stage secondaries. The structural distinction at Catchlight is its exclusive focus on direct venture secondaries — purchasing stakes directly from existing shareholders rather than acquiring entire portfolios from selling funds. This direct-deal model eliminates the blind-pool risk of traditional LP-led secondaries and allows Catchlight to conduct company-level underwriting on assets it selects individually. The firm's cross-border perspective, drawn from its founding team's international background, provides a sourcing advantage in identifying U.S. technology companies where foreign early investors may lack the patience or mandate to hold through extended private-market timelines, creating a natural and recurring pool of motivated sellers.