State of Venture Secondary market 1H2025

The VC secondary market isn’t one cohesive market. It’s a set of distinct, diverging layers—each behaving differently under the same macro headlines.
When we hear that liquidity is rising, pricing is improving, or new investors are flooding in, the answer is: yes—but not everywhere.
The gap between cohorts is widening. Like in public equities, where we now separate the Magnificent 7 from the S&P 493, venture secondaries are splitting into strata.

At the top sits the liquid segment: companies valued above $10 billion, trading at tight spreads and often at a premium to their last primary rounds. We track this tier through the Launchbay 25 Index. In this part of the market, tender offers are routine. These companies—especially AI leaders—use secondary sales as a strategic lever in the talent war, offering liquidity to retain and recruit.

Below that is a band of roughly 40 to 45 “semi-liquid” companies. This tier has remained stagnant in 2025, with no material increase in participants or share of activity. It’s stable, but it’s not expanding.

Meanwhile, the illiquid long tail is swelling in size but shrinking in relevance. These companies struggle with pricing opacity, limited financial disclosures, and deeply discounted trades. Their share of market activity is declining.

Capital is concentrating at the top. The gravitational pull toward mega-size, AI-native, U.S.-based companies is intensifying. Just as in VC, venture dollars are now pooling into a tiny number of titans: in Q2 2025, over one-third of all U.S. venture dollars went to just five companies. We’re seeing the same pattern in public markets: the Mag 7 now make up over 34% of the S&P 500’s market cap—up from 30% a year ago—and just two names, Microsoft and Nvidia, drove 42% of the index’s H1 gains.

What’s more, this top-heavy structure is not static—it’s renewing itself. In H1 2025, 16% of the total listed secondary volume came from companies that had zero presence in the market a year prior. Of these newcomers, 18 jumped straight into the liquid tier. The most active names include SandboxAQ, Crusoe, Cohesity, Apptronik, and Saronic.

Market Size and Flow

We expect full-year 2025 secondary volume to exceed $175-$185 billion. For context, global VC primary investment reached $189.9 billion in just six months, H1 2025. So while primary and secondary volumes now sit within the same magnitude, their fundraising paths are diverging.

Global VC funds raised $41.6 billion in H1 2025—the weakest first-half showing since 2017, and down from $60 billion a year ago. Meanwhile, overall PE/VC secondary funds raised a record-breaking $80.8 billion, the secondary VC it’s still a small part of this, but it’s the fastest growing. Only a half-dozen managers control >80 % of VC-secondary AUM; and a limited number of newcomers are filling sub-$100 m gaps. Stripping out the huge buy-out-heavy continuation vehicles raises, around $4-5B of venture-specific secondary fire-power was added in the first six months of 2025.

In other words, on one hand, the primary fundraising is under pressure, secondary capital formation has never been stronger, but a huge liquidity gap remains as secondary funds remain a fraction, especially in VC, compared to the primary.

Who’s Coming In

Wave of new investors entering the secondary market—including both traditional allocators and newer entrants. Coller Capital’s latest LP barometer shows that more than one-third of institutional investors plan to increase exposure to secondaries in the next 12 months, even among those who’ve never transacted before. The intent is real, and the dry powder is already in motion.

Mutual-fund-style wrappers are rapidly entering the tech-growth secondaries arena for wealth clients.  Recent launches include Coatue’s tender-offer Coatue Innovation Fund, ARK Invest’s ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX), and the long-running Private Shares Fund (PRIVX), all offering gated quarterly liquidity into late-stage venture stakes.  StepStone’s SPRING fund adds scale, using interval- or tender-offer structures to let private-bank and RIA investors buy into discounted pre-IPO portfolios with bite-sized minimums and regular repurchase windows.

What Comes Next

In the near term, the market is accelerating—and concentrating. It’s moving toward dominance of the few, billion-dollar valuations, AI-native models, and U.S. headquarters.

But in the medium term, paths diverge. Tokenization could rewire transaction mechanics and reduce friction—but will it reach the long tail, or simply streamline deals for those already at the top? AI could democratize access to company-level data—but will that draw investor attention to neglected companies, or further concentrate it?
At the same time, demand for liquidity inside high-growth, AI-focused companies is driving more frequent and structured secondary sales.

Companies are not just tolerating secondary activity—they're increasingly controlling it. The OpenAI–Robinhood tokenization dynamic is just the latest signal in a broader shift toward managed secondary markets.

Where this goes next depends on structure, access, and transparency. That’s why scenario planning must be data-informed. The rest of this report breaks down how different segments of the secondary market behaved in H1 2025—and what those patterns suggest about what’s coming next.

Activity

What is the venture secondary market? This report is based on companies listed on the Launchbay platform. in 1H2025 To analyze market dynamics, we categorize companies into three cohorts.

liquid: Members of the Launchbay 25 Index

Semi-Liquid: Companies with both active bids and asks, and total bid-side or mid-price volume > $1M over the last 6 months

Illiquid: Companies with some activity, but falling short of the above thresholds

Despite an increase in the number of semi-liquid companies, their share of overall market activity shrank. The market is consolidating around a narrower group of highly liquid names.

Buy-side activity is intensifying:
Bid-side share of total listings rose to 48% in 1H 2025 (vs. 31% in 1H 2024)
In AI specifically: bid share rose to 45% (from 14%)

Young companies are gaining traction: companies aged 5 years or less made up 19% of listed volume in 1H2025 vs. 12% in 1H2024.

Sector and Geography Concentration

The VC secondary market is becoming more AI-heavy and U.S.-dominated:

• AI companies accounted for 35% of total listed volume (vs. 23% in 1H 2024)
• U.S.-based companies made up 83% of listed volume (vs. 75%)

This mirrors the primary VC market, where AI startups attracted 53% of global VC dollars in 1H 2025 and 64% in the U.S. (PitchBook).

Large companies are taking more share:

• Companies valued at $100B+ accounted for 33% of listed volume in 1H 2025 (vs. 13% in 1H 2024)
• The "Private Mag 7" accounted for 44% of all volume (vs. 20% in 1H2024)

Growth Snapshot

Median valuation growth across platform-active companies was flat in 1H 2025. But AI companies stood out with a 17% median gain — as did higher-valuation names and firms in the liquid and semi-liquid cohorts, both showing positive median growth.

Companies founded in 2020 or later had median growth of 70% and made up 19% of listed volume. Older companies (2010–2019) had 0% median growth.

Top movers

Pricing Trends: Premiums & Discounts

Secondary market pricing showed a modest recovery in 1H 2025. The median discount to last primary round narrowed to -27%, up from -39% a year earlier. But beneath the surface, pricing diverged meaningfully by segment.

Spreads

Spreads narrowed slightly in the hyper-liquid tier but widened in sectors like SaaS and AI, suggesting growing dispersion in investor views even within high-interest categories.