The next bottleneck in secondary markets may not be liquidity itself, but the ability to efficiently manage increasingly complex transactions at scale
The private company secondary market is no longer a niche segment of the capital markets. According to William Blair’s 2026 Secondary Market Report, global secondary transaction volume reached a record $220 billion in 2025, representing 42% year-over-year growth, with market participants expecting volumes to increase further to $250 billion in 2026. Just two years earlier, annual secondary volume stood at approximately $110 billion, illustrating both the pace and scale of the market’s expansion.
Most discussions surrounding this evolution focus on familiar themes: valuations, liquidity, regulation, or the next high-profile private company expected to go public. Yet behind these headline developments lies another transformation that receives far less attention. As private markets become larger, more active, and increasingly institutional, the operational infrastructure supporting them has not evolved at the same pace.
Technology companies serving the secondary market ecosystem, including Secondary Suite, which develops technology that helps organizations operate more efficiently, reduce operational complexity, and scale as transaction volumes grow, work closely with investment banks, broker-dealers, family offices, and investment firms every day. Through those relationships, a common pattern is becoming increasingly clear. The industry’s next challenge is creating the infrastructure capable of supporting this growth efficiently and at scale.
From Trading Floors to Digital Infrastructure
History suggests this evolution is both natural and inevitable. Every mature financial market eventually reaches a point where technology ceases to be merely a supporting function and becomes part of the market’s infrastructure itself.
Public equity markets experienced this transition decades ago. Trading floors evolved into electronic exchanges, paper tickets gave way to sophisticated order management systems, and today’s markets rely on tightly integrated platforms for execution, compliance, pricing, market data, and post-trade processing. Those technological advances did far more than improve efficiency, as they fundamentally expanded the market’s capacity to grow.
If we look at the private markets now, they appear to be approaching a similar stage. As transaction volumes increase (along with media coverage), operational complexity expands far faster than deal activity itself, creating challenges that cannot be solved simply by adding more people or relying on existing processes.
From Relationships to Platforms
The rapid expansion of the secondary market has fundamentally changed how private company transactions are managed. What was once a relationship-driven market, where a limited number of opportunities could be coordinated through personal networks and manual processes, is becoming increasingly institutional, involving more participants, larger transaction volumes, and greater operational complexity.
Unlike public market trades, secondary transactions rarely follow a linear path. Buyers and sellers enter and exit discussions, valuations evolve, documentation moves between multiple stakeholders, and approvals are required at different stages. Managing a single transaction is relatively straightforward; managing dozens of live opportunities across multiple issuers is not. Yet much of this activity still relies on spreadsheets, email threads, shared folders, and generic CRM platforms that were never designed for the unique characteristics of secondary markets.
As activity scales, four operational challenges become increasingly intertwined. Organizations must maintain visibility across increasingly complex deal lifecycles, identify the right counterparties under the appropriate pricing, structure, and timing, consolidate fragmented pricing and market intelligence from multiple sources into actionable insights, and coordinate an ever-growing volume of communication spanning introductions, NDAs, negotiations, approvals, and transaction updates. Each of these tasks is manageable individually. Collectively, they create an operational burden that increasingly limits scalability, visibility, and execution, highlighting the need for infrastructure purpose-built for the realities of modern secondary markets.
The Next Stage of Market Evolution
The investment community is already positioning for this next phase. According to William Blair, secondary-focused funds raised a record $95 billion in 2025, while available dry powder reached $248 billion. Even more telling, capital allocated to secondaries has grown from 3% of total private capital fundraising in 2021 to 10% in 2025, reflecting the asset class’s rapid institutionalization.
History suggests that when markets reach this level of maturity, the next wave of innovation is no longer driven by capital alone, but by infrastructure. As transaction volumes grow, participants multiply, and workflows become increasingly interconnected, the ability to manage information, counterparties, pricing, and execution efficiently becomes a defining competitive advantage.
The next chapter of the secondary market is likely to be shaped by the technology and infrastructure that enable market participants to operate efficiently, transparently, and at institutional scale. Companies such as Secondary Suite are emerging in response to this structural shift, building technology specifically designed for the operational realities of secondary markets rather than adapting tools originally created for adjacent industries.
