Everyone wants a piece

Not long ago, venture capital was a cottage industry running quietly on Sand Hill Road. Today it's one of the most important asset classes in the world, and everyone wants in.

The most innovative companies of this era are staying private longer. The number of U.S. public companies has roughly halved from 8,000 to 4,000 since the late 1990s (1), while the count of venture-backed private companies has exploded to nearly 100,000 over the same time period (2). Late-stage rounds that once measured in the tens of millions now clear hundreds of millions; last quarter was the biggest quarter for venture funding ever, with ten rounds alone absorbing over $200B (3). And when these companies finally go public, they do it at trillion-dollar valuations.

The innovation economy has become a strategically vital national asset, driving breakthroughs in intelligence, energy, robotics, and defense. The largest investors in the world: asset managers, private equity, hedge funds, sovereigns, corporates, and endowments are each pushing earlier into the lifecycle. The sell side moved to keep pace too: investment banks stood up dedicated private-markets desks and bought their way in to meet client demand. Secondaries went from a back-channel favor to a standard liquidity option for anyone in the asset class.

Venture stopped being a niche and became the main event. And everything that got us here is about to accelerate.

The next act is bigger

The companies defining the next era of venture aren't just staying private longer, they're raising more money, more often, than any companies in history, public or private. This shift was already clear as day before AI; AI just poured fuel on the fire. As software gets cheaper and faster to build, value and capital flow to the harder problems software alone cannot solve: building new foundations for the world. And rebuilding the world's foundations costs staggering sums, so these companies don't raise once and disappear for two years; they raise continuously.

Let's look at a few examples: Anthropic, racing to put frontier intelligence in everyone's hands, raised more than $100B in six months (3). Anduril, re-architecting defense around autonomous systems, raised twice in under a year for a total of $7.5B (3). Kalshi, building an entirely new capital market for the world's events, raised over $2.5B in four rounds in the last 12 months alone (3).

Now imagine not three of these companies, but thousands, all raising at the same time, continuously. This would require trillions of dollars deployed every year, more than fifteen times all of global venture in 2025 (2).

Investors will have to keep pace or innovation will be constrained. Capital deployment and fundraising will need to happen near-instantly. Investors’ ability to co-invest, borrow, and otherwise lever up their portfolio will become a necessity. Capital distributions before IPO will be the norm, and tender programs and ad-hoc secondaries will become even more vital to venture.

At Caplight, we're not building for a world with two or three trillion-dollar private companies. We're building for a world with hundreds of them. There's just one problem: the rails to move that much capital, that fast, don't exist yet.

The messy market problem

Venture is the purest power-law business: a handful of companies return entire funds, so winners are fought over and protected at all costs. That makes it intensely relationship-driven and deliberately opaque; information asymmetry is the edge, and no one was ever incentivized to make the market transparent. The messiness isn't an accident; it’s the design.

You can see it in every job venture does. There are five:

1. Source: Form a thesis on where the world is heading and connect with the companies shaping it. Today, it's relationship-gated: if you're outside the network, you'll likely miss the next fund-returner. Cold emails won't save you.

2. Value: Price a private company with whatever data is available. The price must reflect a market that may not exist yet, the company's actual performance to-date, and what others might pay. Today, those inputs are scattered across point solutions, some publicly available, but most proprietary.

3. Transact: Get a deal done. Primary or secondary, it takes hours of negotiation, dozens of emails and calls, and up to six figures in legal fees. Templated documents and light standardization help, but these deals still happen in inboxes, on phone calls, and in virtual meeting rooms.

4. Manage: Oversee the portfolio while adding value where you can. Returns come from one or two companies, so most of your time goes to helping them, ideally earning the right to invest again.

5. Move capital: Your clients are your investors. Raise from them to make bets and generate returns, then manage liquidity to distribute those returns. This too is a relationship game, mostly in person or over calls. Marketplaces exist for blind-pool funds; raising for a one-off deal is still the wild west.

Every job traces to the same root: relationships gate access, workflows are analog, transactions aren't fungible, and information is trapped in disconnected tools. That was survivable when the market was small. But for a market to support many trillion-dollar companies, each requiring continuous capital, every one of these frictions becomes a ceiling. Spotting the next big company means nothing if you can't act on it. So we set out to fix this, starting with the data layer.

Come for the data, stay for the network

One of the most opaque corners of venture is the secondary market, where shares in private companies change hands. It's also one of the fastest-growing: as companies stay private longer, secondaries are becoming a primary source of liquidity. So that's where we started.

Today, Caplight is the market leader in venture secondary data. We sit on over $300B of proprietary secondary-market data and $4T in funding-round data, with coverage of more than 100,000 private companies and investors. Tier-1 asset managers, venture funds, and investment banks use us for one reason: our data is the best in the market. Our customers collectively manage more than $52 trillion, and rely on Caplight to value their portfolios, track the market, and map investment themes.

Our transaction data gets the attention; it exists nowhere else, and there is no central exchange you can pull private company prices from. But what excites me more is the network asset we've built over the past five years: billions in buy-and-sell interest from institutional transactors, thousands of platform conversations between users, and pipes into 700+ registered broker-dealers, investment advisors, and qualified institutional buyers. Caplight is not a read-only data platform, its a network.

We built all of this for the venture secondary market. But we're not stopping there.

Announcing our $16M Series A

Today we're thrilled to announce our $16M Series A, led by BlackRock and Fin Capital, with strategic participation from UBS Investment Bank.

This puts the world's largest asset manager and largest wealth manager behind Caplight, not just as investors, but as partners. BlackRock opens up collaboration across its private-markets and technology ecosystem, including Aladdin and Preqin, plus adds the capital, distribution, and expertise of the world's largest investor. UBS brings nearly 10,000 financial advisors worldwide, along with its capital markets, institutional order flow, and equity research capabilities.

I'm grateful, too, to the backers who saw it early: Fin Capital wrote our first check in 2021 and is still all-in as a lead. New investor Leap Global Partners co-led. Existing backers DB1 Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Deutsche Börse Group, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Clocktower Ventures, and Dash Fund increased their positions.

This capital accelerates our work. Caplight's data and network stay the foundation as we expand into every corner of venture. We’ll add more data on more companies and investors, and more transactions running through our network: co-investment, primary fundraising, tender offers, and, in time, lending and hedging products.

All of it serves a single mission, to make capital and access frictionless, so the only thing that decides a venture capital deal is conviction.

This is bigger than Caplight

A round like this is a vote of confidence in Caplight. But it's also something larger, a vote of confidence in private markets themselves.

When a market becomes more institutional, it grows; and as it grows, it gets more efficient. That efficiency is valuable to all market participants, typically resulting in more transparency, deeper liquidity, lower transaction friction, and lower fees. Every dollar we put into better data and better connectivity rails makes the whole market work better for everyone in it.

The flywheel doesn't stop there. More available capital lets the world's most important companies innovate privately for longer, and lets investors deploy more into the innovation economy, funding the breakthroughs in intelligence, energy, robotics, and defense that will define this era. Step by step, we move closer to a private market as efficient as the public one, where every dollar flows freely to where it creates the most value. That isn't just good for Caplight's customers, it's good for innovation itself.

If you're a venture investor, consider this an invitation. We want to serve you, we want your input, and we want you building this future alongside us.

This is a milestone, and that's all it is. Now it's back to work. Thank you for being part of the journey.

Javier, Justin, and team Caplight

Disclaimer: This communication is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or investment products. Consult with your financial advisor or an investment professional before making any investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Investments in private companies are illiquid, as there is a limited secondary market for private company shares.

Sources:
(1) Apollo Academy: Comparing Public and Private Markets
(2) Pitchbook
(3) Caplight Data