Trends in Pre-IPO Investment Research

I recently caught up with an old family friend whose distribution firm advises ≥ ₹5,000 crore in AUM for HNI clients in India. He had one interesting observation to share: Over a decade ago, he had to push hard to convince his former life insurance clients to invest in the public market (stocks & mutual funds). He convinced my mom to begin MFs in 2008, AIFs in 2015 etc. Today, the equation is very different: Zepto raised $350M from domestic family offices, Swiggy shares were bought pre-IPO by HNIs, public market legend Ashish Kacholia is writing $5M+ cheques into startups. According to him, both new & old money clients are aggressively deploying capital into both public & private markets. His team has to ask clients to steady (”slow down”) their deployment pace — what was a “push” business is now a “pull” business. 💡His observation: There is a newfound fascination with private markets (i.e. angel investing) and the word “family office”. He is seeing individual UHNIs allocate > 5% of liquid net worth to private investments. ✅It is quite common to see investors who have made fortunes elsewhere begin private market investing — even the legend late Mr Jhunjunwala did private transactions BUT these were more PE / buyout transactions (e.g. Star Health in 2018). But this time, it is different: Investors are going early stage (i.e. writing angel cheques, Seed cheques etc). What we know from the data ⤵️ (1) Successful public market investors have diversified into privates: Madhu Kela’s alternative investment fund - Singularity AMC - has over ₹2,100 crore in committed capital. (2) Indian HNIs are making portfolio investments too (i.e. taking LP positions in VC funds); 40% of Blume Ventures Fund IV (size ~ ₹2,500) was domestic capital (3) Indian HNIs are investing in private markets beyond equity — private credit is an attractive asset class (e.g. 85% of Trifecta Capital’s ₹1850 crore Fund III was domestic capital) ❓Why is everyone running to privates — according to him, after booking profits in public markets & seeing 100%+ ‘pops’ on listing — investors have higher risk appetite to take on illiquidity & capital erosion risk in private markets. And how is this manifesting? Every 3rd person in my gym in Mumbai is an “Angel investor” or “LP”. And, this is NOT the Shark Tank effect 😂 This is the Wealth Effect. ➡️ It will be interesting to see how many of the new crop of Angel investors can stomach the capital loss — it hits in year 2 when you get your 1st shutdowns. Brutal but best of luck to everyone who does this 👍 #startups #india #venturecapital

Pre-IPO cybersecurity vendors (a mixture of startups and late-stage series funding) collectively secured US$2.07 billion in new funding during Q4 2024, marking a 23% increase from the previous year. However, this amount fell short of the six-year quarterly median.   The good news: funding levels improved overall for full-year 2024, up 41% on 2023, indicating signs of an easing of the funding crunch.   The bad news: Despite this improvement, total funding was still 49% lower than the peak of the funding boom in 2021, when interest rates were at their lowest.   This might be a long-term correction in cybersecurity startup valuations, certainly in the era of mid-to-low single-digit interest rates. Consequently, they will have to remain more conservative with hiring and expansion plans than in the past. Nevertheless, startups are a vital source of innovation. Many are acquired, while some succeed in establishing themselves as leading vendors. However, without funding and a return for investors, this cycle will break. According to the latest research:   • Funding in 2024 was concentrated among fewer vendors, though this varied quarter-to-quarter, with the number of deals down 4%. Late-stage funding (Series D and beyond) doubled, accounting for 29% of the total.   • Vendors headquartered in the US secured 77% of the total funding last year. Those based in France accounted for 7%. Israeli-based vendors secured 5% in 2024, a significant drop from 12% in 2023.   • Some of the largest funding rounds in 2024 were secured by vendors focused on cloud security (Wiz, Upwind Security), email security (Abnormal Security, Sublime Security), identity security (Semperis, Silverfort), data security (Cyera), managed services (I-Tracing, Huntress), and OT security (Armis, Claroty, Nozomi Networks).   • 62 pre-IPO cybersecurity vendors have secured more than US$300 million to date, totalling US$37.16 billion, of which 78% was secured since the start of 2020. The top 20 have secured US$19.19 billion.  • Wiz, Netskope, Snyk, OneTrust, Securonix, Tanium and Fireblocks have secured US$1 billion or more in funding. 

A new wave of cybersecurity IPOs is anticipated over the next 12 to 18 months. SailPoint's re-entry last week served as an initial test, and despite a muted first-day performance, the subsequent upward trajectory of its share price suggests a positive outcome. New research led by Matthew Ball at Canalys (now part of Omdia) analyzed 24 previous cybersecurity IPOs between 2012 and 2024 to spotlight the most active investors that funded those vendors’ growth and their subsequent performance post-listing. The results were mixed: • The 24 vendors (see chart) collectively were valued at $51.8 billion at IPO and raised a total of $6.1 billion in funding. SentinelOne ($1.2 billion), CrowdStrike ($612 million) and Cloudflare ($525 million) were the top three in terms of IPO funding. SailPoint recently surpassed them all by raising $1.3 billion. • In the lead up to their IPOs, the 24 vendors secured $4.4 billion in pre-IPO funding. SentinelOne ($697 million), CrowdStrike ($445 million) and Tenable ($310 million) led the way. The current three most funded pre-IPO vendors are Wiz ($2.0 billion), Netskope ($1.4 billion) and Snyk ($1.2 billion). • More than 150 different investors provided funding in the lead up to the 24 IPOs. Accel, Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.p. had invested in four or more of them. These plus others like Lightspeed, Coatue, ICONIQ Growth, and Andreessen Horowitz, are among the most active in the next wave of potential IPOs, and will be looking for a return on their collective (all investors) $63.5 billion of pre-IPO cybersecurity vendor funding since 2020. • 13 of the 24 vendors have either been acquired or gone private. Splunk and Carbon Black were acquired by Cisco and VMware for a combined value of $30.2 billion. The remaining 11 were acquired in take-private deals totalling $47.4 billion. Like with SailPoint, this allows vendors to invest in longer-term strategies free from the scrutiny of quarterly reporting. • Thoma Bravo took six vendors private (ForgeRock, Ping Identity, Darktrace, Proofpoint, SailPoint and Sophos) for $33.5 billion. Permira (Mimecast) STG – Symphony Technology Group (FireEye, Inc.) Vista Equity Partners (KnowBe4) Francisco Partners (Sumo Logic) and Turn/River Capital (Tufin) were also active. The Thoma Bravo and Permira assets are most likely to follow SailPoint and return to being publicly listed.

The real shift in venture capital isn’t AI. It’s liquidity. Funds and early investors can’t afford to wait another 10 years for IPOs. So liquidity is showing up before IPO. That’s why venture capital is finally starting to behave like a real asset class — not a lottery. Here’s what changed. 10–15 years ago: - companies went public in 5–7 years - almost no secondary market - pre-IPO = fully locked capital Today: - top tech companies stay private 10–12+ years - employees and early investors sell before IPO - structured secondaries and tenders are normal - SPVs became the default access layer This means late entry doesn’t automatically mean late upside. And this is where the maths finally works. Example #1 — Coinbase 2018 last private valuation ≈ $8bn IPO in 2021: public valuation ≈ $86bn That’s: 86/8≈10.7× Even a much later pre-IPO secondary entry at, say, $20bn, still implied: 86/20≈4.3× That’s not early-stage risk. That’s late-stage repricing. Example #2 — Circle pre-IPO price: less than $31 per share Opening price: $69 per share That’s an instant 2.2× re-pricing from IPO price to market open: 69/31≈2.23× Months, not years. pre-IPO SPVs are no longer about patience — they’re about timing and structure. Example #3 — SpaceX (expected IPO) private valuation references: ~$1.25T IPO expectations: materially higher Modelled conservatively as a scenario: secondary SPV entry: $1.0T liquidity event: $2.0T+ 2.0/1.0=2× Not because SpaceX is “early” — but because liquidity is close and public markets reprice scale aggressively. “What’s the entry price, time to liquidity, and optionality?” - we see this thinking consistently across late-stage and secondary-focused investment clubs we work with at Quoroom. If you’re interested to hear about pre-IPO SPVs when setups like this appear, submit your interest via the Co-Investment Interest Form in the comments. Pre-IPO isn’t about being early anymore. It’s about being close enough to liquidity.

Since 2023, the pre-IPO market has been a story of AI winners and, well, everybody else. In 2025, we started to see that trend shift as investors began piling back into crypto and fintech leaders, amongst others. The market remains concentrated, and the rarefied group that makes up the 50 most liquid stocks on Hiive is surging. The Hiive50 Index — an equal weighted index of our most liquid securities — reported an annual return of 49.1%. By contrast, the S&P 500 returned just 17.9% in 2025. And while traditional SaaS continues to struggle with investor interest, lagging the Hiive50’s results by -33.2%, the index’s returns were no longer primarily driven by AI winners in 2025. In fact both the fintech and crypto subsets of the Hiive50 outperformed AI, at 166.7% and 106.5% returns each over that period. In addition to impressive returns amongst the top stocks, our 2026 State of the Pre-IPO Market report highlights a significant increase in private market liquidity, as measured by volume, breadth, and institutional participation on Hiive in 2025.  ► Higher volume: Over $2.1B in total volume transacted: more than 2023 and 2024’s totals combined.  ► Wider breadth: Shares in a record-high 150 companies traded in Q4. ► Larger transactions: Transactions greater than $1 million accounted for nearly 70% of volume, demonstrating high institutional participation. I’ve been saying it for a while and I’ll say it again: liquidity begets liquidity. Companies and their shareholders are increasingly participating in the private market as liquidity continues to grow, creating greater opportunity for all stakeholders. Read all the insights in our 2026 State of the Pre-IPO Market report. #privatemarkets #preIPO #secondaries #liquidity #venturecapital #unicorns https://lnkd.in/gCC-aKXV

The investment landscape in early-stage biopharma is evolving, with a shift towards earlier-stage assets. While capital is moving earlier, the data infrastructure serving investors has not moved with it. Across dedicated biopharma funds, crossover funds, and deep tech VCs, few firms systematically access the compound-level SAR and bioactivity data that underpins the very assets they are evaluating. Dedicated biopharma funds - RA Capital, Deerfield, OrbiMed - already have the scientific infrastructure: PhD analysts, internal research divisions, in some cases proprietary AI platforms. The bottleneck is not expertise. It is converting that expertise into repeatable, systematic competitive intelligence - potency benchmarks, selectivity profiles, ADMET comparisons at scale. Expert network calls are episodic. They do not build cumulative institutional knowledge. Crossover and hedge funds - Point72, Perceptive - face a more acute translation gap. Their data stack (Citeline, GlobalData, Evaluate, Cortellis) tells you what stage an asset is at and what the commercial forecast looks like. It does not tell you whether the underlying chemistry is differentiated. At Series B and pre-IPO crossover rounds, before clinical data exists, that question often is the investment thesis. A common response here is "we use ChEMBL for this." ChEMBL annotates compound data from approximately 2,500 patents. GOSTAR, Excelra's manually curated SAR database, screens 4 million patents and annotates over 100,000 - capturing a fundamentally different breadth of chemical IP, specifically the early, patent-disclosed compound data most relevant for preclinical-stage and pre-readout competitive analysis. Deep tech VCs - Flagship, a16z, GV - present a different picture entirely. This segment is not evaluating SAR data; it is training models on it, building portfolio companies that depend on it, and investing at the infrastructure layer. The relevant question here is not accessibility but curation quality. A 2024 eLife study on data-centric AI for virtual drug screening found that data size, composition, and quality had a greater impact on predictive performance than algorithmic sophistication. Semi-automated datasets introduce noise at precisely the edge cases that matter most for model performance - and that is a risk worth understanding when evaluating AI-native drug discovery platforms. Whether a compound is genuinely differentiated - in potency, selectivity, or ADMET profile - relative to everything else disclosed in a target space is an answerable question. SAR data answers it. The question is not whether this data is relevant to investment decisions. It clearly is. The question is whether firms access it systematically or episodically, and the quality of said data when they do. Excelra | GOSTAR - Global Online Structure Activity Relationship Database #drugdiscovery #biopharmainvestment

The real story in the private markets goes far beyond potential IPOs and AI mega-rounds. While public markets navigated significant volatility in Q1, the private sector saw a record-breaking $300 billion deployed globally. But as we see every day at EquityZen, the most fascinating dynamic isn't just how much capital is being raised; it's how these assets are actually being priced and traded. At EquityZen, our platform data offers a real-time barometer for investor sentiment and pre-IPO valuations. This week, we released our Q1 2026 Private Company Investment Trends report, and the data tells a compelling story of a market transitioning from cautious discounts to high-conviction premiums, while rewarding scale. Some key takeaways: • The end of the deep discount: The era of across-the-board secondary discounts is effectively over. In Q1, the average trading discount on our platform shrank to just 8%. Notable, 34% of secondary trades on EquityZen executed at a premium to the company's last primary funding round. • Hard Tech is the new software: While AI predictably remains the most popular sector, we are seeing a surge in demand for defense, robotics, and energy infrastructure, while traditional SaaS and consumer tech take a backseat. • The Mega-cap move: 37% of our transaction volume occurred in companies valued at over $20 billion, as demand grows for market leaders. We are operating in a bifurcated market. Now more than ever, navigating the private markets requires transparent data and a nuanced understanding of sector-specific dynamics. Check out the full report to see the data driving the private market today: https://lnkd.in/exKMyrYk #PrivateMarkets #VentureCapital #PreIPO #SecondaryMarket #EquityZen #HardTech

Most of the marquee IPOs this year are trading more than 50% below their opening prices, a quiet signal that something fundamental has shifted. Public markets are no longer where growth is discovered; they are increasingly where risk is transferred. The median time to IPO has roughly doubled since the late 90s, extending from around ~5 years to roughly 14 years today, a trend clearly illustrated by companies such as SpaceX, OpenAI, Databricks, and so forth This inversion would matter less if access to private markets were broadly available, but they aren't. Today, pre-IPO trading remains slow, expensive, and opaque, defined by negotiated block trades, issuer veto power, and multi-month settlement cycles. The result is a structural mismatch. Value creation has moved decisively into private markets, but the price discovery and liquidity infrastructure has not followed. Retail investors are locked out not by lack of interest, but by market design. Over the past decade, institutional secondary platforms, issuer-sanctioned liquidity programs, retail SPVs, and principal-based resellers have all attempted to solve pre-IPO access. Each improves one dimension while worsening another. None produce what actually matters: a liquid, real-time spot market. Access to pre-IPO equity may be the single hardest unsolved problem in modern capital markets, and precisely because of that, it represents one of the largest greenfield opportunities for startups willing to tackle market structure rather than surface-level access.

Looking at trends from the last year, the biotech IPO market has shifted toward a more disciplined and selective approach, favoring companies with strong clinical-stage progress, clear capital planning, and well defined milestones. 2024 saw a healthier IPO market than the previous year, with 18 biotech IPOs, up from 10 in 2023, but the bar for public offerings has risen. Investors are looking for companies with tangible near-term catalysts, often within a year of going public. Therapeutic focus matters, with CNS, immunology, and oncology dominating the IPO landscape. For biotechs considering an IPO in 2025, strategic preparation is critical. Investors expect financial discipline, a compelling narrative, and a clear path to value creation. Gone are the days when early stage companies could rely on momentum alone. Now, specialist investors demand solid data and thoughtful execution. With generalist investors pulling back and high interest rates shaping the market, the companies that succeed will be the ones that can prove their worth early and often. A biotech IPO isn’t just a funding event, it’s a long term strategy that requires market awareness and a strong scientific and financial foundation. For those preparing to go public, the key question isn’t just ‘can we’, ‘but should we, and how do we make it count?’

📉 Secondary markets for startup equity are heating up again Companies like Stripe, SpaceX, Databricks, and OpenAI have all enabled employee liquidity before IPOs, often at $50B–$175B+ valuations. At the same time, platforms like Forge global and EquityZen are reporting a pickup in private share trading activity. Zooming out, there’s real capital behind this. Firms like BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, Hamilton Lane and Goldman Sachs have all expanded their exposure to late-stage private companies and secondary transactions. Dedicated secondaries funds have grown meaningfully over the past few years, stepping in to buy shares from employees and early investors looking for liquidity. The backdrop matters: the median time to IPO is now 10+ years (vs ~4 years in the late 90s). People aren’t willing to wait that long with all their net worth tied up in one company. So instead of “join, wait → IPO payday,” we’re seeing something different: join, build, and sell a piece along the way. Liquidity is becoming continuous, not an event. And that quietly changes behavior. Employees de-risk earlier. Founders lose some of the “golden handcuffs.” And the IPO becomes less of a life-changing moment… and more of just another milestone. My take: startup outcomes are shifting from binary to incremental. Less of a light switch. More like a dimmer. More rational. Probably healthier. But maybe… a little less magical.