For all the growth of mutual funds and other public-market investors in private tech, one class of investors finds it hard to get access to the market: ordinary individuals. That’s thanks to steps private companies have taken in recent years to clamp down on trading in the secondary market for their stock, frequently bringing in institutional investors to buy up big chunks of shares at once from employees.
But individual investors are still finding ways to buy into some private companies. One way they’re doing so is through secondary market services such as EquityZen, which pools groups of small investors to buy private tech company shares, as well as derivative securities which use private tech shares as collateral but where shares don’t actually change hands.