Hiive Markets Ltd., an online trading platform for shares of venture-backed companies, is hoping to raise as much as $100 million as soon as this year, its chief executive officer said.
The Vancouver-based startup, founded in 2021, is profitable and isn’t in active funding talks right now, but would like a substantial cash infusion to move faster, founder and CEO Sim Desai said in an interview with Bloomberg News. Its Series B target is an ambitious leap from 2023, when it raised C$5.7 million ($4.2 million) from investors including Uncorrelated Ventures, Splash Capital LLC and Harmony Venture Partners.
Hiive handled $930 million in transactions of private-company shares in 2024, Desai said. Successful sellers pay a fee between 3.5% to 5%, which would put last year’s revenues at about $35 million, he added by email.
A drought of IPOs means company founders, employees and investors are looking for other ways to realize gains or turn equity into cash. Hiive is among a pack of upstarts trying to make a market for illiquid shares and options — rivals include Forge Global Holdings Inc. and EquityZen Securities LLC.
“Large, global financial players are going to be the ones who will be the longer-term competitive tension with us — like the Morgan Stanleys and Goldman Sachses of the world,” Desai said. “In order to take them on, we’re going to have to do a large raise.”
Signs of competition are mounting. Morgan Stanley started offering its wealth clients pre-IPO share trading last year. Nasdaq Private Market and CBOE Global Markets Inc. are also in the space, while the UK plans to launch its own market, dubbed Pisces, for private companies selling shares later this year.
Hiive sellers tend to be private-company employees, while buyers are usually institutional investors, including crossover funds, hedge funds, family offices and secondary funds, Desai said. Wealth clients are showing “increasing interest” in buying, he added.
For buyers, the price of entry is high: The platform’s minimum transaction size is $25,000 and in the US, buyers must be accredited investors, which the Securities and Exchange Commission defines as being an investment professional in good standing, having a net worth over $1 million, or having income of more than $200,000.
After starting by simply matching buyers and sellers, which requires getting approval from companies for proposed transactions, Hiive created an interface to give startups more oversight of the process, from signing documents to settling transactions. Forty-three companies now use the tool, Desai said.
The company handled $390 million in transactions in the first quarter of 2025, he said, or 68% more than last year’s quarterly average.
The downsides of the secondary market are its opacity and lack of liquidity. Hiive’s most-traded companies — such as crypto startup and IPO candidate Payward Inc., doing business as Kraken — have “dozens of transfers per month,” Desai said.
For sought-after private stock such as in Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., valued at $350 billion in a December tender offer, secondary trades are indirect, as the company largely doesn’t get involved, Desai said. Interest in the company is instead bought and sold in slivers of pooled funds, a.k.a. special-purpose vehicles or SPVs, which typically don’t have to be cleared by SpaceX because they’re a step removed from the underlying security.
The US limits private companies to 2,000 direct investors before they must file financial information with the SEC, meaning hordes of investors are vying for these SPV pools.
Desai said Hiive offers its own managed SPVs, which it does due diligence on, but there’s been a proliferation of less trustworthy SPVs — which also market themselves on Hiive.
That “is going to be an issue for regulators to look at, because some of these SPV sponsors are literally one-man shops,” he said. “It’s kind of a Wild West.”
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