In May 2025, Clay, the AI sales automation startup, ran a tender offer that allowed most of its employees to sell shares at a $1.5 billion valuation. Linear, a six-year-old project management company valued at $1.25 billion after its Series C, followed with its own tender offer. Then ElevenLabs authorized a $100 million secondary sale for staff at a $6.6 billion valuation, double its previous price. None of these companies are public. None plan to go public anytime soon. Yet their founders and early employees have already cashed out millions.
The secondary market for private startup shares is on track to exceed $210 billion in 2026. For founders who built companies over the last decade and are nowhere near an IPO, it has quietly become the most practical path to liquidity.
Why Companies Are Staying Private Longer
The average time from founding to IPO has stretched to over ten years for venture-backed startups. Rising compliance costs, volatile public markets, and the overhead of quarterly earnings scrutiny have made staying private an increasingly rational choice. But founders who have spent a decade building are sitting on paper wealth they cannot spend, invest, or use to de-risk their personal finances.
Secondary transactions solve that problem without requiring an exit. TechCrunch reports that the structure of these deals has shifted significantly since 2021. A founder sells a portion of their shares to a new investor or through a platform, capturing partial liquidity while remaining fully committed to the company. The company stays private. The founder gets paid. The cap table shuffles slightly.
Stripe has run this playbook repeatedly, conducting multiple tender offers to give current and former employees liquidity without triggering an IPO. Gusto ran a $200 million tender offer for employee liquidity. Plaid completed a tender offer at an $8 billion valuation. These are not obscure workarounds. They are standard operating procedure for well-capitalized private companies.
The Platforms Making Secondary Market Sales Accessible
Until recently, secondary sales were largely brokered through private networks and required significant legal overhead. That has changed. Several platforms now specialize in matching founders, employees, and early investors with buyers looking for exposure to high-growth private companies.
Forge Global, which was acquired by Charles Schwab in January 2026, operates a secondary marketplace where accredited investors can buy and sell pre-IPO shares. The platform handles the deal mechanics and works with companies to facilitate the transaction within their governance frameworks. EquityZen has facilitated transactions involving more than half of the 25 largest venture capital-backed companies, providing liquidity to shareholders at scale. Nasdaq Private Market and CartaX serve similar functions for institutional-grade secondary activity.
Shares on these platforms typically trade at a 10 to 30 percent discount to the most recent funding round valuation, the price you pay for liquidity on a non-public asset. For a founder who raised at an $800 million valuation and holds $50 million in paper equity, selling $5 million at a 20 percent discount still nets $4 million in actual cash. Most founders find that calculus compelling.
How Tender Offers Work for Founder Liquidity
A tender offer is a company-facilitated process where the board sets a price and allows shareholders, including founders, employees, and early investors, to sell a defined percentage of their holdings at that price. The buyer can be the company itself, a new investor coming in at that round, or a secondary marketplace.
The structure matters. During the 2021 boom, founders sometimes took tens of millions off the table in outsized personal secondary sales that attracted negative attention from investors. The current approach is different: company-wide tender offers that include employees across the cap table are viewed far more favorably. When ElevenLabs ran its $100 million secondary sale in 2025, it framed it as a retention and reward mechanism for the entire team, not a founder exit play.
Founders considering a secondary sale should understand that board approval is almost always required. The company’s governance documents typically restrict share transfers, and any secondary sale needs to fit within those constraints. Most investors will approve a secondary transaction that represents less than 10 to 15 percent of a founder’s total holdings, especially when structured as a company-wide offering.
What the $210 Billion Number Actually Means
The secondary market exceeding $210 billion in 2026 is a reflection of how much value is locked up in private companies that have delayed their public exits. That capital wants to move. Institutional investors who missed the early rounds of top startups are increasingly willing to pay a premium for secondary shares, sometimes even above the last round valuation, for companies with strong revenue trajectories.
The Forge-Schwab acquisition signals something broader: the secondary market is no longer a niche corner of venture finance. Charles Schwab paid to own the infrastructure for private-share trading because the demand is large enough and growing fast enough to justify the investment. That institutionalization is good for founders: deeper liquidity pools, more professional deal processes, and better price discovery.
For founders who built companies before the 2021 boom and are still waiting for an exit that hasn’t materialized, the secondary market is not a consolation prize. It is a legitimate financial tool that the most sophisticated private companies in the world are already using. Understanding how all the funding mechanisms available to founders actually work is the starting point, and the secondary market deserves a prominent place in that picture.
As companies continue staying private longer and the secondary market grows, founders who understand how to use it will have meaningfully more financial flexibility than those who don’t. The founders at Clay, Linear, and ElevenLabs aren’t waiting for an IPO to realize value from what they built. Neither should you. See also: the revenue strategies that improve your position before any secondary transaction.
