There are now more places to buy pre-IPO equity than at any point in the last decade. In a private market marketplace, that's good — competition has tightened spreads and forced platforms to publish more information than they used to. If you're still building foundational context on how pre-IPO investing ecosystems and secondary platforms operate, review the complete guide to pre-IPO investing before comparing venue selection and execution quality. It's also confusing. Most of the platforms look similar at the URL level. Their actual coverage, supply depth, and time-to-settlement are very different — which is why availability of names like Epic Games private shares varies so much between venues.
This guide is the side-by-side our team gets asked for almost weekly. It's not a ranking; the right venue depends on what you're trying to buy, how big a check you're writing, and how much process tolerance you have. But there are two axes that matter more than any other for accredited buyers — how often the platform actually has the name you want, in the size you want, and how much friction sits between an indication and a settled position. We'll walk through the major venues on those two axes, then add the supporting line items (pricing transparency, fees, eligibility, structures), and finish with where Limen Markets Private sits.
The landscape — six platforms covering the late-stage private market
These are the venues most accredited buyers will encounter when they start shopping. Brief, factual profiles based on each platform's public materials and our team's experience working alongside them on shared issuers.
Axis 1 — supply: how often the name and size are actually available
The single biggest variable between platforms isn't the catalog. Almost every venue lists the same headline names — SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, Databricks. The variable is whether those listings are backed by confirmed sellers right now, or are aspirational placeholders the platform will try to source if a buyer signs up.
In our experience working alongside other platforms on shared issuers, the gap between catalog and confirmed supply can be wide. A name showing 'available' on a directory page may, in practice, mean a 4–8 week shop process where the platform tries to find a seller after a buyer indicates. That isn't bad faith — it's how thin secondary markets work — but it materially changes what 'available' means.
Limen Markets Private is built around the opposite default. Every name on the marketplace is backed by confirmed seller-side supply at the moment of indication, sourced through direct relationships our trading desk has spent a decade building — employee tender pools, fund secondaries, founder allocations, and private holders we've onboarded one by one. Supply is refreshed hourly, and the dashboard you see is the dashboard the desk sees.
Axis 2 — friction: indication to settled position
Once a buyer says 'yes,' how many days, signatures, and follow-up calls separate them from a position appearing in their portfolio? This is where platforms diverge most sharply, and where most buyer dissatisfaction originates.
The friction stack has four components: indication review, supply confirmation, document execution, and wire/clearance. A clean trade should clear all four within five business days. Slow venues stretch the middle two — supply gets shopped after the buyer commits, and documents are papered fresh per trade rather than from a vetted template.
Our 1–5 day target is achievable because we run supply confirmation and ROFR-clearance in parallel with documentation, not sequentially. Templates are pre-vetted with each issuer's general counsel; SPV operating agreements come out of a library, not a Word doc. The result is most trades clear in two to three business days, with the upper bound reserved for the issuer-side transfer policies that intentionally slow things down.
- Indication. Pick a company and a size. Live indicative price and implied valuation are visible immediately.
- Confirmation. A specialist confirms supply within one business day — usually same day for our top 10 issuers.
- Documents. SPV subscription docs and the operating agreement are sent for e-sign. ROFR clearance runs in parallel.
- Settle. Wire instructions delivered in-app. Position confirmed and reflected in the portfolio in 1–5 business days from indication.
Pricing transparency
Every credible platform now publishes some level of pricing information. The gap is in completeness — whether you can see the implied valuation, the spread to the last primary round, the vehicle fee, and the carry on the same screen, before you commit.
- Limen Markets Private — implied valuation, spread to last primary, vehicle fee, and carry are visible on every indication before you sign. No fee is disclosed late, no spread is buried in the documents.
- Hiive — listing-level prices are very transparent (it's an order book). Vehicle fees and carry are disclosed in subscription docs at the SPV stage.
- Forge / EquityZen — pricing visible to logged-in users. Spread economics on SPV-wrapped positions disclosed in the offering memorandum.
- Augment / Notice — varies by listing and structure; both publish enough for accredited buyers to underwrite, with full economics in deal docs.
Fees, minimums, and structure
Across the venues, total cost of ownership for a pre-IPO position lands in a fairly tight band. Differences are usually in the carry and the spread rather than the vehicle fee.
None of these are outliers on cost. The differentiation is on what the fee is buying — speed, supply, transparency — not the fee level itself.
Eligibility
All major pre-IPO marketplaces require accredited-investor status for the bulk of their offerings (Reg D 506(c)). Limen Markets Private follows the same rule, and additionally has limited Rule 506(b) availability for non-accredited investors when space exists in a specific offering. Because Reg D restricts general solicitation of 506(b) offerings, we don't list or describe those by name on the public site — non-accredited investors interested in participating should contact the team directly to ask whether any current 506(b) offering has space.
The bottom line
The right marketplace for you depends on what you're trying to do. If you want a transparent order book for watching pricing and intent across the late-stage private market, Hiive is excellent. If you want institutional-scale depth on a handful of mega-cap names, Forge has the book. If you want diversified exposure through pre-IPO funds, EquityZen has tenure on its side.
If you want to actually transact — to indicate on a name and have a position cleared in your portfolio inside a week, with the implied valuation, fee stack, and structure all on the screen before you sign — our claim is that Limen Markets Private has the wider supply book and the cleaner workflow. We've spent a decade building the relationships that put confirmed sellers on the platform, and the desk is staffed to run trades to settlement, not to shop them after the fact.
The honest version: for the deepest names with the fewest hands, no single venue has all the supply all the time. Sophisticated buyers run accounts on two or three platforms and let coverage compete. We expect that. We just want to be the one you call first because the answer is usually 'yes, we have it.' For how today's venues fit the current pre-IPO market, see our full market map.
Where to start
- Browse the live marketplace at /marketplace — every issuer you see has confirmed supply at the moment of viewing.
- Read the complete guide to pre-IPO equity (28 minutes) at /resources/complete-guide.
- If you're a seller, the seller playbook is at /resources/seller-playbook.
- Questions on a specific name — including 506(b) availability — go through the team. The chat assistant on every page ("Ask Limen Markets", bottom-right) routes you to the right person.