Secondary Startup & Pre-IPO Markets

EquityZen is not a pre-IPO trading platform — it's a packaged private equity product with retail access. Morgan Stanley-owned, 2.5% transaction fees (post-2026), $5K-$50K minimums, K-1 tax reporting, multi-year illiquidity. AltStreet has enumerated the platform's complete funded-SPV census from SEC Form D: 1,933 SPVs, $1.565B, 2015-2026.

Republic is a multi-entity private-investment marketplace built around a FINRA-registered Reg CF funding portal and broker-dealer, with no located enforcement actions across its registered entities, $308.0M in SEC-verified realized Reg CF raises, and a house token (the Republic Note) whose issuer never paid a distribution, disclosed one month of cash runway, and lawfully terminated its SEC reporting in May 2026.

Clarity, the pre-IPO marketplace known as Hiive until September 22, 2026, is a live-order-book secondary market for direct share transfers and SPV-wrapped fund access: up to 4.85% buyer fees, up to 5.75% seller fees, an 18% ROFR exercise rate in 2024, a $25,000 standard minimum, and no recurring management fee on most fund products.

Forge gives you institutional-grade data, but requires institutional-style engagement to actually transact. It is one of the strongest platforms for private market intelligence, fund access, and custody, but execution remains specialist-driven, fee visibility is incomplete before engagement, and Forge Price is not a tradeable price.

UpMarket is a vertically integrated offering structure: the platform, the broker-dealer placing the deals, and several fund managers share disclosed affiliations or common control. Access Funds layer affiliated-broker fees on top of management fees, carry, and undisclosed underlying-fund fees, and the broker-dealer self-reported a net-capital deficiency to regulators.

Augment sells units of pre-IPO positions it has already bought, from $10,000, through series it calls 0-and-0: no management fee and no carry. All 107 of their Form D filings report sales commissions to Augment's own broker-dealer: $22.6M against $309.0M sold at filing, a 7.0% median on the 2026 series, and up to 10% under the adviser's brochure. Who bears each commission is set in the transaction documents, not by Form D.

Equifund is a direct-response crowdfunding platform: a FINRA funding portal for Regulation Crowdfunding raises and a marketing company that hosts Regulation A deals, aimed at mining, biotech and space companies that plan to list. Ten Reg CF issuers reported $31.6M raised since 2019 at a 7 to 8 percent cash fee plus up to 7 percent in stock. Three of its Reg A issuers reached a public quote (two exchange listings and one OTC-quoted issuer), and on October 9, 2026 all three were quoted below their original Equifund offering price, a current mark rather than a realized return.

Moonfare offers accredited US investors access to institutional private equity funds at $75K minimums, including KKR, Carlyle, EQT, Apax, Warburg Pincus, Vista, Hg, and Lexington. But AltStreet's 61-record catalog analysis found recurring disclosure-quality problems, the data room did not unlock in a verified KYC test, and the captive US broker-dealer's FY2025 revenue was mostly affiliate debt forgiveness rather than placement fees.

StartEngine is a multi-exemption capital-formation platform with a principal-traded Reg D Series product line: Reg CF for non-accredited investors, Reg A+ for direct startup offerings, and accredited-only Reg D 506(c) Series where affiliate-acquired shares are resold through Series LLC structures at disclosed markups of 29% to 194% over the affiliate's purchase cost.

Wefunder is one of the largest US Reg CF funding portals by capital volume — described by FINRA in the 2022 AWC as the largest participant in the crowdfunding space — a regulated marketplace hosting third-party startup offerings at $100+ minimums, no secondary market, and a documented but resolved 2022 FINRA settlement that covered the platform's first five years of operation.

Equitybee is an accredited-only platform that funds startup employees' stock-option exercise costs in exchange for repayment of principal plus 2-4% annual interest plus a 17-42% equity share at the eventual liquidity event. Investors do not buy shares; they buy interests in single-purpose Section 3(c)(1) Series LLCs whose disclosure document is a templated private placement memorandum identical across the series, with deal-specific economics surfaced only on an authenticated dashboard and in each series' SEC Form D.

AltStreet reconstructed the SEC Form C record of PicMii Crowdfunding, the Lancaster, Pennsylvania funding portal that renamed itself Highlander on March 15, 2026: 113 Regulation Crowdfunding offerings by 107 issuers since 2021, 22 of them with a filed raise totaling $12.8 million, and 15 raises live on the platform's own public API with $754,036 committed between them. Three things the site does not put together for you: the portal's flagship success, Arrive AI, trades about 98 percent below the split-adjusted price its crowd investors paid and faces a Nasdaq compliance deadline on September 28, 2026; the largest raise in the portal's history was a $4.87 million real estate vehicle that later reported $0 revenue for fiscal 2024 and stopped filing; and the old PicMii website has been taken down, so the platform's PicMii-era offering history now exists only on EDGAR.

MicroVentures markets itself as equity crowdfunding, and AltStreet's reconstruction of its SEC record shows that channel is now close to dormant: 195 Regulation Crowdfunding offerings by 182 issuers, peaking at 38 initial filings in 2020 and down to 4 in 2025, with no offering open on the platform's own public feed on September 18, 2026. The business still filing steadily is accredited-only, a series of single-purpose Regulation D vehicles numbered in Roman numerals that had reached MVP LS FUND 685. The company publishes 'over $550M' raised on one of its sites and 'over $700+ million' on the other, with no reconciliation between them; AltStreet could verify $289,281,413 of capital sold through the platform's own offerings, and explains below why that is a floor rather than a refutation.

Linqto sold retail investors units in single-company vehicles holding pre-IPO shares, paused transactions in 2025, and filed for Chapter 11 in the Southern District of Texas on July 7, 2025. AltStreet rebuilt its Regulation D record: 1,231 Form D filings resolving to 546 offerings, $486,124,079 reported sold and 22,222 investor positions, and not one offering in the entire book ever reported 100 investors or more.

The Private Shares Fund (PRIVX) is a registered interval fund that gives investors with $2,500 and no accreditation a portfolio of late-stage venture-backed companies. Class A returned 7.91% a year at NAV over the ten years to September 30, 2026, against 9.84% for the Russell 2000 it reports against, and the fund costs 2.46% to 2.74% a year plus sales charges of up to 5.75%. At June 30, 2026, SpaceX was 23.7% of its $1.54 billion of net assets. Holders can sell only in quarterly repurchase offers for 5% of shares; they tendered 8% to 12% of the fund in each 2025 offer and 8.54% in June 2026, and requests were prorated.

Two days before this review, the SEC filed a civil securities-fraud action against Netcapital Inc., its CFO and other defendants, alleging the company materially overstated revenue — nearly $14 million, per the complaint — through purported consulting agreements, some allegedly forged. Those are contested litigation claims, not adjudicated findings, and they land on top of what AltStreet's own data already showed: a Form C census of 473 offerings since 2016 in which the median offering raised $48,580 against a median $1 million displayed maximum; a custodial structure in which investors do not hold their shares directly; and a parent whose filings carry a going-concern warning, $19.9 million of portfolio-company impairments — including stakes in companies that had raised on Netcapital — and a secondary-trading feature 'paused' after years of being marketed as the liquidity answer.

AngelList, the administrator behind roughly 25,000 venture SPVs and funds for accredited investors, now sells any US investor a $500 share of USVC Venture Capital Access Fund, a registered closed-end fund advised by its own AngelList Asset Management that buys third-party SPVs and venture funds holding names like xAI, Anthropic and OpenAI. The filings show a fund that was 92% the adviser's own $8.1 million seed at its first audit, raised $29.5 million in the three months after its April 22, 2026 launch and stood at about $55.8 million of capital on September 25, charges 4.55% gross and 2.50% net under a waiver that runs to November 2027, held 39% of net assets in a government money-market fund and one position at 19% on June 30, and offers liquidity only through tender offers its board may decline to make.

Destiny Tech100 (NYSE: DXYZ) is a registered closed-end fund that any brokerage account can buy, holding late-stage private technology companies such as Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI mostly through special purpose vehicles. Its net asset value per share went from $6.44 at the end of 2024 to $34.30 at June 30, 2026, and the fund's own financial highlights attribute most of that to selling new shares above net asset value: $9.95 of the $13.49 rise in 2025 and $7.10 of the $14.37 rise in the first half of 2026 came from the at-the-market program, not the portfolio. That accretion raised net asset value for every holder already in the fund, but it did not translate into comparable shareholder returns: a shareholder who held at the market price lost 47.96% in 2025 and 15.90% in the first half of 2026, because the market premium compressed faster than net asset value rose. Management named the shelf behind that program as its principal plan for a going-concern warning at December 31, 2024, and the proceeds, together with portfolio dispositions, also remediated a breach of the fund's tax diversification test; at June 30, 2026 the program had left 57.5% of net assets in a money market fund, on which the adviser charges 2.50%.

Robinhood Ventures Fund I (NYSE: RVI) is a registered closed-end fund that Robinhood Markets seeded with $350 million, took public at $25.00 a share on March 6, 2026 in an offering underwritten by Goldman Sachs, with its brokerage affiliate Robinhood Financial distributing an undisclosed portion through IPO Access, and now advises through a wholly owned subsidiary for 2.00% of net assets with no performance fee. At June 30, 2026 it held thirteen private companies bought directly on their cap tables, led by Databricks, OpenAI, Mercor and Revolut, with 32% of net assets still in a money market fund, and a net asset value of $25.02 against a $24.05 audited NAV at March 31. The market did the rest: the shares closed at $73.71 on May 13, 2026, about 206% above the last published NAV, and at $24.81 on July 31, below it. Between June 3 and August 31, Robinhood Markets, the adviser's parent and the fund's largest disclosed holder, sold 1,233,062 shares for $38.5 million at an average of $31.23, against a seed cost of $24.62, and filed notice to sell more. Robinhood Ventures Fund II (NYSE: RVII), a business development company holding SAFEs in 79 Y Combinator companies with a 2.00% fee and a 20% incentive fee on realized gains, listed on August 13, 2026 at $25.00 and closed at $21.55 on October 2.