Marketplace for pre-IPO stock raises at US $77 million valuation following explosive growth

Forbes Midas List investor Salil Deshpande's Uncorrelated Ventures bets on the trading platform alongside key secondary market players 

• Hiive, the world's fastest growing marketplace for stakes in private venture backed companies, raised at a US $77 million post-money valuation.
• Uncorrelated Ventures, led by Forbes Midas List investor Salil Deshpande, was joined in the round by Splash Capital, Harmony Partners, Hack VC, Agmen Capital, and Renaud Laplanche, current CEO of Upgrade and the founder of Lending Club.
• The capital will fuel Hiive's mission to centralize and automate private shares trading. 
• The platform attracts tremendous interest from market participants as a rare source of live private markets trading data generated directly by buyer and seller interactions. 

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 17, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - Hiive, the first marketplace offering direct trading between buyers and sellers of pre-IPO shares, has raised its first institutional capital from global investors. Investors in the round included Uncorrelated Ventures, led by Forbes Midas List investor Salil Deshpande, along with Splash Capital, Harmony Partners, Hack VC, Agmen Capital, and Renaud Laplanche, current CEO of neobank unicorn Upgrade and co-founder of Lending Club.

"Many funds are active secondary buyers, and with IPO markets being choppy or companies just choosing to stay private longer, there are many more secondary sellers," said Deshpande. "Having looked at the other options in the market, we concluded that Hiive represents by far the best attempt to date at aggregating liquidity in this opaque and fragmented market."

Launched in May 2022, Hiive is the first platform to fully automate a private shares marketplace in which buyers and sellers can meet and trade directly with each other. "Institutional users are attracted to the platform's real-time and continuous trading data, whether or not they are looking to transact," said Sim Desai, Founder and CEO. 

"There are many players hawking private market data. But the quality is usually low as it is based on surveys of brokers and investors, some of whom may have no intention to buy at all, rather than on bona fide customer orders or transactions. By contrast, if you see a price on Hiive, you know that it comes from a real bid, ask, or trade placed directly by a confirmed buyer or seller on the platform." 

In the past 12 months, the marketplace has grown both its rate and volume of transaction completion around six times. Hiive's headcount has also exploded during this time, rising from six in January of 2022, to 45 today. Desai anticipated continued growth, pointing out that Hiive has more than ten job openings at the moment.  

"We're proud to have achieved this in the midst of the most challenging VC secondary market conditions since 2008. If market momentum starts picking up in the wake of recent tech IPOs, then our trajectory should only steepen."

Hiive also offers a way for private company management teams to provide liquidity to their shareholders in a controlled manner without all the legal costs and effort of formal liquidity processes. 

"Traditional tender offers run by the likes of NPM and Carta are costly, cumbersome, and even risky since they might not succeed at the fixed price," Desai noted. "It puts a lot of eggs into one basket for the issuer and usually does not fully meet the ongoing liquidity needs of shareholders. We aim to offer companies a flexible alternative to this approach while keeping them in control of key parameters." 

Hiive is a fintech startup offering a marketplace for buyers and sellers of shares in private and pre-IPO, venture-backed companies. The trading platform allows qualified investors to place an order to buy or sell shares of late-stage companies directly with another party, without the need for a live broker. By developing solutions that streamline and automate shares trading, Hiive aims to unlock the full value of the private markets for investors, employees, and the management teams of pre-IPO companies. A regulated securities brokerage, Hiive is a FINRA member and operates and alternative trading system regulated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.  

Hiive was founded by Sim Desai, CEO, a veteran of the private equity secondary market, along with co-founders Sarah Huggins, COO and General Counsel; Prab Rattan, Chief Revenue Officer; and Stuart Eccles, Chief Product and Technology Officer.

For more information, visit hiivemarkets.com, or contact [email protected]. 

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SOURCE Hiive