Secondary shares marketplace Forge agrees to acquire rival Sharespost in a $160M cash-and-stock deal; Forge has raised $109M to date, Sharespost has raised $38M
Even amid a pandemic, there's a race on to create a powerful, global private securities marketplace where private shares …
Context & Ripple Effects
Private-share trading has been consolidating exchange-style for years: Nasdaq set the template with its acquisition of SecondMarket in 2015, folding a startup-liquidity venue into an incumbent exchange. Forge buying Sharespost is the same play executed by the startups themselves — two of the few US marketplaces where employees and early investors can sell stakes in still-private companies are becoming one.
The $160M cash-and-stock price against the pair's combined ~$147M raised suggests the strategic value is the merged order flow, not the fundraising track records. The bet pays off downstream: Forge becomes the reference venue whose platform prices get quoted when startup shares fall, and ultimately the target of Schwab's expected acquisition of Forge Global.
First-order effects
- US secondary-market competition collapses to essentially one independent specialist venue: sellers of pre-IPO shares face fewer competing quotes, and Sharespost's $38M raised ends in a sub-scale exit relative to Forge's $109M war chest.
Second-order effects
- Institutional buyers gain a consolidated counterparty — the same dynamic that later sees firms like Lexington, Brookfield's Pinegrove and StepStone raising billions for dedicated secondary vehicles, concentrating demand through a single marketplace.
Third-order effects
- If the Nasdaq–SecondMarket and Forge–Sharespost pattern holds, standalone private-securities exchanges don't survive as independents: they either merge with rivals or get absorbed by retail brokerages and exchanges, ending with private-market trading inside incumbent financial institutions.
The trend: Trading in private-company shares is consolidating from fragmented specialist marketplaces into a handful of exchange-scale platforms that incumbents ultimately acquire.