Earlyasset has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding and emerged from stealth. New Stack Ventures led the round.
Cervin Ventures, Andrew Ryan of Alex Brown Venture Capital Services and several angel investors also participated in the financing for the Park City, Utah-based startup.
The company is targeting the venture secondaries market, where shareholders in private startups seek to sell equity before a public listing or trade sale. A lack of market infrastructure has left large amounts of private company value difficult to convert into cash.
According to figures cited by Earlyasset, venture-backed businesses now remain private for about 14 years on average, up from roughly six years in 2000. It also estimates that founders, employees and early investors hold more than $4 trillion in private company value across the venture ecosystem.
That has created a growing pool of shareholders with limited liquidity options. Around four million shareholders hold equity in venture-backed companies, according to Earlyasset, and many struggle to sell shares to cover taxes, exercise options, buy homes, fund education or return capital to investors.
Market Bottleneck
Secondary markets for startup shares already exist, but activity is concentrated in a small number of well-known companies. Data from Caplight, cited by Earlyasset, shows that more than 80% of venture secondary transaction volume is concentrated in just ten companies.
As a result, thousands of smaller venture-backed companies have little practical access to organised liquidity. Earlyasset argues that traditional secondary transactions are often too slow and expensive for modest share sales, with deals taking three months or longer and generating more than $10,000 in legal and administrative costs.
Rather than building a conventional brokered marketplace, the company plans to combine capital deployment, valuation tools and transaction execution to make smaller, faster secondary deals possible.
Nick Moran, General Partner at New Stack Ventures, said the current market structure has failed to keep pace with the growth in private company ownership.
“These structural dynamics are creating a real liquidity challenge across the startup ecosystem,” Moran said. “Companies are staying private longer, which means equity is accumulating across millions of shareholders. The infrastructure around that ownership hasn’t kept pace. Earlyasset is building the kind of market infrastructure needed to unlock liquidity across a much broader set of companies.”
The issue has become more prominent as the market for initial public offerings has remained subdued and private companies have stayed off public markets for longer. That has extended the period during which founders, employees and early investors may hold paper wealth without a clear path to cash.
Infrastructure Focus
Shawn Bercuson, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Earlyasset, said the problem lies in the structure of private markets rather than short-term economic conditions.
“If you own stock in a public company, you know exactly what it’s worth and you can sell it today. If you own equity in a private startup, you probably have no idea what it’s worth and no easy way to sell it – and that’s been true for decades, regardless of what the economy is doing,” Bercuson said. “That’s not a timing problem. That’s a plumbing problem. The basic infrastructure that makes transactions work in public markets was never built for private markets. That’s what we’re building.”
Its approach is designed to give shareholders pricing information and a way to request liquidity, while reducing the operational burden on companies that manage cap tables and approve transfers. It also aims to deploy its own capital alongside transactions and broaden participation beyond the handful of companies that currently dominate the market.
The startup is entering a segment that has drawn growing attention from large financial institutions. In 2025, Goldman Sachs bought Industry Ventures and Morgan Stanley acquired EquityZen, moves that signalled rising institutional interest in private market liquidity.
Shareholders can now join a waitlist as Earlyasset prepares to roll out its platform. Early users will be able to register private holdings, receive pricing insights and seek liquidity.
“As companies stay private longer, the market needs better infrastructure for liquidity. Our goal is to create a win for shareholders seeking liquidity, companies managing their cap tables, and investors deploying capital into the private market,” Bercuson said.
