MicroVentures vs EquityZen 2026: Two Private-Company SPV Factories

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The structure is the same on both platforms and it is not the one most buyers picture. You do not receive shares of SpaceX or Stripe. You receive a membership interest in a limited liability company that holds those shares, and that company is the shareholder of record. EquityZen states this plainly and carves out its Direct acquisitions as the exception. MicroVentures runs the same architecture under Roman-numeral branding, currently MVP ES FUND and MVP LS FUND, which had reached 167 and 685 by September 2026. The difference that matters is upstream of the wrapper. EquityZen describes itself as a secondary marketplace: it buys from employees and early investors who want liquidity, and its economics come from standing between them and an accredited buyer. MicroVentures does not state, for any vehicle, whether the securities were acquired from the company in a financing or from an existing holder, and it separately markets an accredited investing line and a secondary trading desk without saying which vehicles belong to which.

Short answer

EquityZen charges 2.5% to the buyer and 2.5% to the seller on a completed transaction, published on its own site and cut from a prior 5% tiered structure after the Morgan Stanley acquisition took effect in February 2026. The buyer directly bears 2.5%; the seller's half may be reflected in asking prices but is not a second charge to the buyer. Underneath that sits a second layer most buyers underweight: the vehicle itself can carry management fees and carried interest, which is a fund cost rather than a transaction cost and is disclosed per deal. MicroVentures publishes nothing. On September 18, 2026 its /fees, /pricing, /terms, /terms-of-service, /how-it-works, /docs, /legal, /tax, /investor-resources and /liquidity pages each returned 158 characters of navigation chrome and no content. The only fee AltStreet can source for MicroVentures comes from the other half of its business, where the rules force disclosure: every Regulation Crowdfunding offering's Form C states the intermediary's compensation. That was 7 percent of the amount raised on 50 offerings from 2016 to 2018 and 5 percent on 81 offerings from 2020 to 2025, with securities equal to 2 percent of the securities sold on 126 of 194 offerings, worth roughly a further 2 percent of offering value at the issue price. None of that governs a vehicle investment, which is the problem: the only priced thing on the platform is the product it has largely stopped filing.

Short answer

Both platforms gate their offerings, and the reason is the same exemption. 870 of the 885 MicroVentures vehicles with a Form D in AltStreet's ledger claim Rule 506(b), and so do 1,928 of the 1,929 priced EquityZen vehicles. Rule 506(b) prohibits general solicitation, so platforms relying on it typically gate access and establish an investor relationship before displaying deal materials rather than advertising offerings to the public. That is a real constraint on both firms and it is worth understanding before reading either gate as evasiveness. Where they part company is what the gate costs you. EquityZen runs an accreditation and onboarding flow and then shows you listings, so the relationship is established by the product. MicroVentures' editor test on September 18, 2026 found that completing registration and the full investor questionnaire revealed no offering at all, and the platform responded by asking for a scheduled call. The exemption explains why neither platform can advertise a deal. It does not explain why one of them will not publish a fee schedule, a terms of service or a how-it-works page, none of which 506(b) requires anyone to withhold.

Short answer

Both platforms have a gap between the vehicles that exist and the vehicles the filings account for, and on both it runs in the same direction: the public record understates. EquityZen's is a missing-filing problem. 20.5% of its sequentially numbered Fund I series were allocated a number but have no corresponding Form D, a rate that sat near 2% in 2018 to 2021, hit 68% for series staged between June 2022 and March 2023, and recovered to roughly 9% by 2024. AltStreet observes the absence of a filing and does not observe whether every allocated number represented a staged, investor-facing deal. MicroVentures' is an unamended-filing problem. 370 of its 999 vehicles report no sale at all on their latest Form D, and the ones examined in detail state that the first sale had not yet occurred and were never amended, so whatever they later raised never reached the record. A separate signal points the same way: the firm's audited fiscal 2025 accounts disclose $4,570,855 of placement fee revenue from the affiliated funds in that single year. Without the fee schedule applied across those vehicles that figure cannot be converted into a missing dollar amount, but it strongly indicates that the filed sold amounts materially understate the economic activity running through the vehicles. On neither platform should the enumerated figure be read as the platform's true volume.

Short answer

This is the one dimension on which the platforms are not comparable, because only MicroVentures has it. Alongside its vehicles, MicroVentures ran a Regulation Crowdfunding book open to any investor, through its own broker-dealer registration and, from August 2016 until January 31, 2019, through an affiliated funding portal called First Democracy VC. AltStreet's census resolves 696 Form C family filings into 195 offerings by 182 issuers; 144 were funded for $28,540,887, at a median of $123,698 per offering. What retail investors bought was mostly not stock: of the 194 offerings with an initial Form C, 131 sold a Crowd Note, a convertible that becomes equity only on the triggers its own terms define, and 15 sold SAFEs, against 18 preferred and 4 common. About 25 of 194 offerings conveyed equity at the point of purchase. The channel filed 38 offerings in 2020 and 4 in 2025, and the platform's own public feed returned 145 funded offerings and none active on September 18, 2026. If you are not accredited, this is the only part of MicroVentures that was ever open to you, and it is the part that has gone quiet.

Short answer

Each platform makes a small number of checkable claims and they fail differently. EquityZen's scale claims survive enumeration: its funded-vehicle census reconciles to 1,943 vehicles and $1.578 billion from Form D, and its fee cut to 2.5% is on its own site and dated to the Morgan Stanley acquisition. Its weak claim is the performance one, a 74% net aggregate return with no published methodology. MicroVentures' problem is upstream of any single claim: it publishes two materially different lifetime capital figures on its own two websites on the same day, 'over $550M' on microventures.com and 'over $700+ million' on invest.microventures.com, with no reconciliation and no stated methodology for either. AltStreet could verify $289,281,413 sold through the platform's own offerings. That figure is a floor for the reasons set out above, so the right conclusion is that the company's numbers are unverifiable rather than overstated, and that an investor cannot use either of them.

Short answer

If you are an accredited investor who wants exposure to a named late-stage private company and intends to compare terms before committing, EquityZen is the platform that lets you do that: a published transaction fee, a stated source for the shares, a minimum you can see, a large enumerated book, and a Morgan Stanley parent standing behind the broker-dealer. MicroVentures is worth a conversation when it has access to a specific company you want and EquityZen does not, and the work then falls entirely on you: ask in writing for the vehicle's operating agreement, the placement fee, any carried interest, the expenses charged to the vehicle, where the securities are being acquired from, and the K-1 delivery history, and get all of it before the call rather than after. Existing MicroVentures Crowd Note holders have a different job from either: find the instrument, read what triggers conversion and whether it carries a maturity or repayment right, and check your issuer's Form C-AR history on EDGAR, because 59 of the 179 classified issuers have lapsed in their reporting and 33 never filed at all. Non-accredited investors should note that EquityZen was never open to them and MicroVentures' retail channel had nothing open in September 2026.