Private market activity by investor type

Transcript

Charlie GrimesManaging Director, Head of Forge Global Capital Markets

Who is the most engaged in this asset class at the moment? What different investor types are you engaging with daily and weekly? And how are they approaching this market?  

 

Sally MacePrincipal, Forge Securities

Thanks, Charlie. 

I think it's a really exciting time with Forge, especially considering our purview into the market covering both the retail segment starting with accredited investors, all the way up into the institutional arm of the business where we're transacting with some of the largest institutional investors and asset managers. When we dig into that institutional client base a bit further, we're certainly seeing traditional VC funds as well as family offices, highly engaged with the market. Both of those can be quite nimble, especially when they're looking at adding to existing positions within their portfolio. 

Many of the pricing points that we're seeing in the secondary market are meaningfully lower than where some of these funds may have invested in previous rounds over the last few years. So, they're certainly taking advantage of that. We're also seeing both of those client bases active on the sell side as well in select companies where they have potentially invested early on and have achieved meaningful valuation increases over the years. 

These buyers are especially focused on businesses that they know quite well and have been tracking for years. Another investor type who remains quite active on our platform is traditional secondaries funds. Many of whom raised meaningful amounts of capital over the last few years. We actually saw traditional secondaries funds were some of the first to step back into the market during the initial part of the pullback and remain quite active buyers on our platform. 

Lastly, I'll touch on hedge funds who were a very sizable portion of the buying activity on our platform in 2020 and 2021. While they have certainly pulled back in terms of their buy side activity, they remain quite engaged with the Forge platform both on the trading side as well as the data side of the business and working to understand where markets are actually moving, what the sentiment and the market is and generally tracking this asset class quite closely. 

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