The 2026 State of the Pre-IPO Market

Key takeaways

• The secondary market is no longer a niche: PitchBook estimates $106.3B traded across US VC secondaries in 2025, within reach of the year's entire public-listing exit value ($119.6B).
• The tender offer replaced the IPO as the default liquidity event. OpenAI's $6.6B October tender alone was 6.2% of annual secondary transaction value.
• Companies now reach the public market at a median age of 12 years, roughly twice the level of the late-1990s cohort, and 2025 produced just 90 operating-company IPOs against 1,404 waiting unicorns.
• Trading is extraordinarily concentrated: the top 20 names accounted for 86.4% of Q4 2025 secondary value; the top five, 55.6%.
• The infrastructure consolidated in one season. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Charles Schwab each agreed to buy a private-market platform within four months.
• Settlement remains the choke point: the largest tender venue settled direct secondary transfers for only 31 issuers in all of 2025.

Section 01

The exit bottleneck is structural, not cyclical

The US produced 311 operating-company IPOs in 2021. In 2025 it produced 90, a partial recovery from the 2022 trough of 38, but still less than a third of the peak and below the 1980–2025 average of roughly 203 listings a year. The public company itself is a shrinking population: from more than 8,000 US listings in 1996 to just over 4,000 today.

Twelve years is a working career. An engineer who joined a 2014-vintage company at Series B has, by 2026, waited longer for a listing than the entire dot-com cycle lasted, and 48.5% of today’s unicorns raised their first venture round in 2016 or earlier. The equity is real, the valuations are real, and the owners are still waiting.

Section 02

Liquidity did not wait, it moved private

PitchBook estimates $106.3B of total US VC secondary value traded in 2025: a $91.7B midpoint for direct secondaries (modeled range $62.5B–$120.9B) plus $14.6B in GP-led transactions. For scale, all US VC-backed public listings in 2025 returned $119.6B. The secondary market now moves nearly as much value in a year as the IPO market it substitutes for.

Beneath the modeled total sits $24.8B of directly verified platform and broker volume, the auditable core of the market. The six largest venues account for $22.4B of it:

Two methodological notes keep this honest. Platform figures are self-reported and unaudited, and the modeled total sits atop them with a wide range. And the market’s older size estimates — Industry Ventures’ well-known $100B (2021) and $130B (2023 projection) — are total-addressable-market figures, not closed volume, and are not comparable to the transaction data above.

Section 03

The tender-offer era

The defining liquidity instrument of 2025 was the company-led tender: issuer-sanctioned, price-set, window-limited. The largest ran at a scale no private transaction had reached before.

OpenAI’s $6.6B October window, completed at a $500B valuation, accounted for 6.2% of the entire year’s secondary transaction value on its own. And the market these events trade in is intensely top-heavy: per the Hiive50 index, the twenty most-traded names carried 86.4% of Q4 2025 secondary value, the top five 55.6%. Nothing illustrates the concentration, and the repricing power of private markets, like the largest name of all:

A holder who sold in the July 2025 window realized half the price of the December window, and a quarter of the June 2026 listing. That spread, the cost of illiquidity and opaque price discovery, is the clearest argument in this report for continuous, issuer-approved markets over episodic tender windows.

Section 04

Wall Street bought the rails

In a single four-month window, three of the largest names in American finance each agreed to acquire a private-market platform, the clearest institutional endorsement the asset class has received.

1. Oct 2025Goldman Sachs agrees to acquire Industry Ventures, the pioneer venture-secondaries fund manager.
2. Nov 2025Charles Schwab agrees to acquire Forge Global for ~$660M, a retail giant buying a private-market ATS.
3. Late 2025Morgan Stanley agrees to acquire EquityZen, folding pre-IPO access into its wealth platform.
4. Jan 2026Nasdaq Private Market partners with G Squared for priority tender access.

Capital formation followed: dedicated US venture-secondary dry powder reached $11.8B by mid-2025, up 2.8× since 2022, yet still just 3.9% of primary VC capital. The constraint is no longer demand or dedicated capital. It is plumbing:

Read those two numbers against the $106.3B total. In a hundred-billion-dollar market, direct issuer-approved transfer settled well under one percent of value, across 31 companies, out of 1,404 unicorns. Almost everything else still moves through episodic tenders, brokered blocks, and SPV wrappers. The market found its demand. It has not yet built its exchange layer.

Section 05

What we are watching in 2026