The paper that follows is an observation, not a prediction. It describes a race that we believe is now underway in the late-stage private secondary market, names the categories of participant we believe are positioned to compete in it, and sets out the conditions we believe a winning platform will have to satisfy. We do not predict winners. We are not in a position to.
We also recognize that any market-structure note written from a single vantage point is necessarily partial. We have done what we can to ground our observations in published research, recent practitioner statements, and direct conversations. Where we have got something wrong, or where a participant in this market has a different read of their own positioning, we welcome the correction. The CTAs at the end of this paper invite both.
Bloomberg moment is one paper in a sibling set of three. The Decision Surface is the methodology paper. The defendable price is the procurement framework. This paper is the market structure note. The three describe the same value entity from complementary angles. We expect each to evolve as participants engage with it. A change log at the end of this paper records what has moved from v1.0 to v1.1.
Where this paper sits
This paper is one of a set covering late-stage private-market pricing from two angles: the Reliable Decision Surface (can you trust how the number was produced?) and the Defendable Price (does the number survive institutional scrutiny?), with the open SII standard above both.
On the two angles, this paper sits on the market-structure axis of the Reliable Decision Surface: where the market consolidates and who gets to host the decision. Its methodology companion is The Decision Surface. Its procurement companion, on the Defendable Price angle, is The defendable price.
The full reading map is at https://arcanis.com/research/.
The late-stage private secondary market is consolidating. The question is no longer whether the consolidation happens. It is where the institutional decision-makers will end up living. Multiple structural forces, documented in the next section, are converging on the same outcome. The platforms that host the decision surface, the layer where the hardest pricing calls get made and defended, will consolidate the market around themselves. The platforms that host only the tape will become inputs to that surface, not the surface itself.
This is not a novel argument structurally. Public equities went through the same evolution decades ago, when the consolidated tape became the execution layer and sell-side analyst coverage with disclosure standards became the underwriting layer. Bloomberg consolidated public-markets infrastructure not by being the cheapest price feed but by being the place where every decision-relevant artifact, including data, analytics, news, messaging, and execution, lived in one inspectable workflow, anchored by methodology disclosure and regulatory acceptance. Late-stage private markets are now in roughly the equivalent moment, on the cusp of building the second layer to the same standard the first one, the tape, has earned.
The first layer, in private markets, is the transaction tape: Nasdaq Tape D, Forge Price, Caplight Data, Hiive, EquityZen, and the indices and aggregate references that have been built on top of them over the last three years. This layer is now functional. The second layer, a defendable, inspectable, multi-counterparty decision surface that sits next to the tape and answers the questions the tape does not, does not yet exist at scale. That is the layer the consolidation race is being fought over.
The decision surface and the defendable price are not two creatures. They are one value entity seen from two angles. The decision is what gets made. The price is what defends the decision in front of an LPAC, an auditor, a regulator, a counterparty, or a court. A decision that produces an undefendable price is not finished. A price that does not trace back to a decision logic is not defendable. Whoever hosts one, hosts both. The Decision Surface paper documents the architecture. The defendable price paper documents the procurement bar. This paper frames the consolidation race that decides who hosts the integrated entity.
Six observations follow. The structural forces driving the consolidation. The territory being decided. The categories of participant positioned to compete. The mechanism that makes a decision surface consolidate rather than fragment. The architectural and procurement conditions a winning surface must satisfy. And the implications for each side of the market.
Six structural forces, drawn from recent practitioner research and from the Manhattan Venture Partners (MVP) April 2026 "Secondary is Primary" panel with Tom Callahan (NPM), Eric Yi (Citi PCA), Jared Carmel (MVP), and Jason Saltzman (CB Insights), are pointing in the same direction. Each force, taken alone, is a real structural shift but not yet sufficient on its own to converge into a commonly recognized decision surface. Taken together, they create a single market signal: the institutional decision-maker in late-stage privates needs a layer that does not yet exist at scale, and the platforms that build it first will set the gravitational pull for the rest.
Force one: the distribution drought. Cumulative cash flows to US VC LPs have been negative roughly $197bn since 2022. Distribution yield has fallen from a historical 15% to 7.5%. Roughly one-third of 2017-vintage US VC funds had returned $0 to LPs by March 2024. Endowments and pensions are selling stakes not from distress but from portfolio constraint, and the buyer-side market that absorbs them needs defendable pricing on names that have not recently traded. "DPI is the new IRR," as Brookfield's Tristan Tully put it. This is the single largest demand-side force in the market today.
Force two: the IPO delay and the rise of the tender as the dominant growth channel. Time from first financing to IPO has stretched from roughly five years in the mid-2000s to eight-plus years now, with a 90th percentile of 13.6 years. The MVP panel's strongest single consensus was that secondaries growth will be led less by open bilateral trading and more by structured issuer-controlled tenders, where the company controls process, price, information flow, and participants. Tenders are being described by senior practitioners as "the new IPOs." Four of the ten highest-valued US startups planned tenders for H1 2025. This is a structural shift in liquidity architecture, not a cyclical one.
Force three: the procurement bar is rising globally. The SEC's August 2023 Private Fund Adviser Rules require an independent fairness or valuation opinion for every adviser-led secondary. The rule was partially vacated by the Fifth Circuit in June 2024, but ILPA preserved the templates as voluntary industry standards and top-quartile LPs increasingly require them in side letters. In Europe, AIFMD Article 19 and AIFMD II (in force from April 2024, transposition deadline April 2026) require proper, consistent, and independent valuation with AIFM liability that does not transfer with outsourcing. In the UK, the FCA's March 2025 multi-firm review of 36 firms holding £3 trillion of global PE AUM identified governance, conflicts, independence, and ad hoc valuation gaps as the procurement weaknesses. IOSCO's 2025 consultation is the multilateral channel. The procurement bar for any GP running a tender or continuation vehicle is rising fast and globally. "We built our own model in Excel" is no longer the answer it once was. Audit committees, LPACs, and regulators all need to inspect a methodology, not just a number.
Force four: the price-discovery breakdown is now documented. Quarterly GP marks lag and are too smooth versus true volatility. Pre-2022 boom-vintage marks remain visibly overstated, with companies that last raised in 2020-22 trading at 31-59% discounts. There is no standardized process to determine VC fair value. Block trades show buyers wanting greater than 50% discounts versus sellers accepting 20-30%. The secondary market itself now gives the clearing price: Jefferies reported $162bn of 2024 secondary volume, with LP-led transactions clearing at an average 89% of NAV and venture and growth stakes routinely clearing at 60 to 70% of NAV. The academic literature has documented the same gap: Mark Anson's 2024 Journal of Portfolio Management study showed how appraisal-based marking systematically suppresses measured beta and inflates measured alpha, a pattern the CFA Institute and Morningstar now call "volatility laundering." In April 2025 a coalition of investor advocates wrote to FASB asking it to reconsider the NAV practical expedient under Topic 820. The institutional buyer side is asking for something the market does not yet supply at scale: a price that holds up across counterparties, auditors, and regulators.
Force five: the bank fee-pool migration into private-market liquidity. Investment banks are following the fee pool from IPO and M&A into private-market tenders, continuation vehicles, and wealth-channel distribution. Citi, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan PCA, Evercore, Lazard, Jefferies, PJT Park Hill, and Goldman are all building out private capital advisory practices that compete for the same client wallet. As panelist Eric Yi observed, banks are now leading the largest tender processes. This is the institutionalization of the buy-side, and it brings public-market-grade procurement expectations with it.
Force six: the wealth-channel and retail democratization push. Hamilton Lane, with its 2025 evergreen VC-secondaries hybrid, and Blackstone are launching evergreen and semi-liquid wrappers that include meaningful late-stage VC and VC-secondary exposure; broader alternatives sponsors (Apollo, KKR, Carlyle, Ares) are pushing semi-liquid private-markets products into wealth channels with mostly buyout and credit content but increasing VC adjacency. iCapital ($213bn), CAIS, and Moonfare are scaling distribution. Tokenization is positioned by Citi to grow 80x to roughly $4trn by 2030. Retail and accredited-retail access expansion is happening simultaneously with regulatory scrutiny on retail protection. The compliance bar on what constitutes defendable pricing is rising in parallel with the volume of capital being given access to the asset class.
These six forces converge on the decision surface. The market needs a layer that is auditable, configurable, defendable, and shared across counterparties. The platforms that host that layer will consolidate the market around themselves. The platforms that host only the tape, or only one of the six forces, will be participants but not centers.
A late-stage private company is not a price. It is a future cashflow that has not yet happened. The buyer's upside, and the seller's upside at the deal, both reduce to the same uncertain quantity: what the company will produce, over what time, under which set of conditions. Everything else in the underwriting is an attempt to estimate that quantity defensibly enough to act on.
The estimation has structure. Hundreds of signals, dozens of risks, an evolving set of upside and downside factors, all interact through a dependency matrix that no human can hold in mind simultaneously. The methodological move is to collapse this high-dimensional indeterminacy into a small number of orthogonal scenarios that, taken together, cover most of the universe of outcomes known by the date of the analysis. Each scenario is one coherent strategic path. Together they depict the essence of how this particular company's future can plausibly unfold.
This is not unlike the way physical reality, at sufficient scale, presents itself as solid objects to a human observer despite being a probabilistic field underneath. The collapse is not a simplification that loses truth. It is the reformatting of complexity that no observer could otherwise reason about into a structure that an observer can reason about. A company story can only be understood by a human if it is simplified into a clear narrative. The methodology has to perform that simplification without losing correspondence to the underlying probability surface.
Each scenario carries two functions. The first is a probability distribution over valuation and time, which determines the scenario's contribution to fair value under any given weighting. The second is the explicit set of risks and factors included in the scenario, and the set excluded from it. Excluded risks become the buyer's risks, because the buyer is the party taking future risk. When multiple orthogonal scenarios are weighted together, their included and excluded risk sets resolve into a single integrated risk-return profile: an IRR-versus-risk curve that the buyer can read directly, compare against the alternative deals available in the market at the same moment, and use to evaluate whether this specific deal earns a place in the capital allocation.
This is what gives the surface its institutional utility. Once the curve is available to both sides of a deal, the spread between bid and ask narrows, because the negotiation moves from price-against-price to weight-against-weight. Disagreement becomes legible. Capital flow accelerates.
But the same scenarios do not produce the same curve for every observer. A buyer with a long time horizon weights long-tail outcomes differently from a buyer with a five-year fund clock. An LP focused on downside protection weights the missed-plan scenario more heavily than a GP underwriting upside. New information, even a single insight available only to one observer, can collapse one scenario's probability wave to near zero and extend another's. The market's job is not to deliver one true price. It is to make the structure of disagreement inspectable so that disagreement becomes a structured negotiation rather than a hidden one.
The waves move. News arrives, and one scenario's probability collapses while another's extends; two more may appear. The surface has to update in real time, not because precision changes minute to minute, but because the underlying object is not static.
The decision is a buy, sell, or underwrite call, made for maximum effectiveness of capital flow across probabilistic futures.
The territory is everything that supports the decision: the methodology, the data layer, the marketplace, the participants, the regulators, the audit infrastructure, and the procurement standards that determine which methodologies get used. The territory is also where control consolidates. Governments, the largest institutional capital allocators, and the platforms that win the race to host the surface together decide what becomes the default reference for the whole asset class.
The decision surface, then, is the canvas that wraps an otherwise invisible and constantly moving creature. A late-stage private company is not the same object to every viewer at the same moment. The surface makes it tangible, comparable, and discussable, simultaneously, for multiple viewers who hold different versions of it in their heads. That is the precondition for a deal. It is also the precondition for a market.
The decision and the price are inseparable. The same surface that produces a defendable decision produces a defendable price. The decision is the act of choosing under uncertainty. The price is what survives the LPAC, the auditor, the regulator, the counterparty, and the court. The two are not different creatures. A platform that hosts the decision surface, by the same act, hosts the defendable price. A platform that delivers a defendable price without a decision logic is delivering a number with no traceable thinking behind it. A platform that delivers a decision without a defendable price is delivering thinking that does not survive contact with the institutional system. Both fail. Only the integrated entity wins.
In the spirit of observation rather than prediction, we describe the categories of participant we believe are positioned to compete to host the decision surface. We name specific companies as illustrative members of each category, not as predicted winners. The boundaries between categories are blurring in real time, and the paper will be updated as participants share their own positioning.
Category one: the institutional marketplaces that already host meaningful secondary flow. Nasdaq Private Market is among the most established, with bank-backed institutional credibility and a focused tender franchise. Forge Global, which Charles Schwab announced its acquisition of in November 2025 and completed in March 2026 for approximately $660 million, has substantial brand recognition, a published private-market index, and now sits inside one of the largest US retail and advisor distribution platforms. Hiive operates one of the most active live order books in the market. EquityZen, acquired by Morgan Stanley in January 2026 (announced October 2025), has a distinctive distribution position via Morgan Stanley at Work and Wealth Management. Augment is a FINRA-registered direct marketplace with $750M+ AUM across 300+ companies. Each of these has buyer-side and seller-side counterparties, deal infrastructure, and brand. What they currently lack, in our observation, is the decision surface layer that sits on top of their flow. The platforms in this category that move first to add it are the ones we believe are best positioned in the consolidation race.
Category two: marketplace-derived indices and live-trade reference layers. Caplight, Hiive50, the Forge Private Market Index, Notice50 / Notice, and PM Insights / MSCI build indices and reference levels from secondary transaction flow. They sit close to live-trade reference and have the inputs to extend toward the surface. What they typically lack is the marketplace counterparty connectivity and the underwriting-grade decomposition that turns reference levels into a defendable shared coordinate system.
Category three: the data and analytics platforms. PitchBook, CB Insights, and Crunchbase are the incumbent reference data, with extensive private company information, fund-level data, and market intelligence, but their pricing references are not derived from secondary transaction flow. Industry Ventures' market intelligence layer, sold to Goldman Sachs in October 2025 for up to $965M (closed January 2026), signals the strategic value attached to private-market data assets. These platforms have deep coverage and many of the institutional buyer relationships, but they are positioned closer to data inputs into the surface than to surface hosts themselves. The category leaders that combine their data position with surface infrastructure, either built or embedded, would be unusually well placed.
Category four: the secondary advisory and private capital advisory groups inside the tier-1 banks. Evercore, Jefferies, Lazard, PJT Park Hill, Campbell Lutyens, Goldman PCA, Morgan Stanley, Citi, UBS, William Blair, Houlihan Lokey, and the newer JP Morgan PCA practice are all running tender and continuation-vehicle auctions at scale. The Jefferies and Evercore market reviews have become the public reference data for the entire asset class. These groups have unmatched buyer-list reach, fairness-opinion expertise, and CV structuring capability. They are most plausibly the customers of a decision surface, not the hosts of one, but the boundary is not perfectly fixed.
Category five: the issuer-controlled tender and liquidity-program platforms. NPM (which sits in two categories), Carta with CartaX and tender administration, Augment, EquityZen for tender SPVs, Morgan Stanley Shareworks, Hiive's tender capability, and Linqto. The MVP "Secondary is Primary" panel identified this category as among the most likely engines of secondary market growth. The platforms that win this segment will be those that combine tender administration with the underwriting surface that buyers and auditors need to participate at scale.
Category six: the dedicated PE/VC secondary funds and the evergreen/perpetual capital sponsors. Lexington, Ardian, Goldman Vintage (now incorporating Industry Ventures), StepStone Secondaries, Coller, HarbourVest, Blackstone Strategic Partners, AlpInvest, Pantheon, and Hamilton Lane (with its 2025 evergreen VC-secondaries hybrid). These are the largest dedicated buyer pools. They are a primary consumer audience for the surface, not its hosts, but their procurement decisions drive what gets built.
Category seven: the broker-dealer and matching networks. Manhattan Venture Partners (MVP), Rainmaker, FNEX, NextRound Capital Partners, Unicorns Exchange, Setter Capital, and Sprout. They have deep deal flow and direct issuer and shareholder relationships. They are the most likely white-label embedders of a decision surface, gaining institutional-grade underwriting capability in their networks without needing to build it themselves.
None of these categories holds the full set of capabilities today. The full set, in our observation, requires four things: (1) an active marketplace flow that produces real bid-ask data; (2) data depth and traceability across the long tail of names that have not recently traded; (3) a methodology layer, encoded, IPEV-compliant, source-traced, that converts those inputs into defendable scenario pricing; and (4) institutional procurement acceptance from LPACs, auditors, and regulators. Each category brings one or two of these. The race is about which combinations consolidate first. The integrated entity (decision plus defendable price) is the consolidation prize, not the individual pieces.
Decision surfaces consolidate because the value of a surface depends on how many decision-makers reference it. When buyer and seller use the same surface, the deal closes faster, with a smaller bid-ask, and survives downstream review without rework. When LP and GP reference the same surface, the quarterly mark conversation is shorter and the disagreement is structured rather than political. When 409A auditor and IC member look at the same surface, the audit is faster. When the regulator inspects the surface, the methodology is already documented. Each marginal participant on a given surface makes the surface more valuable to every other participant on it.
There is a second mechanism that runs in parallel. The procurement standard for institutional pricing is rising. Once a critical mass of LPACs, fairness-opinion providers, and 409A teams have inspected and accepted the methodology behind a particular surface, that surface becomes the default reference. Subsequent procurement decisions get easier when the answer is "we use the same surface as everyone else," the way Bloomberg became defensible procurement for public-markets infrastructure. Decision surfaces, like other forms of trusted infrastructure, accumulate institutional approval slowly and then carry it durably.
There is also a memory effect. A surface that accumulates a per-company knowledge base across years of research runs is more valuable than a surface that starts from scratch each engagement. Whoever builds memory first holds an asset that compounds. The platforms that hold the longest surface-history have a moat that is difficult to compete with even by a better-engineered late entrant.
The three mechanisms compound. Multi-counterparty value brings participants onto the decision surface; procurement standards keep them there; persistent memory makes the decision surface more valuable to each new participant than it was to the last. What they collectively produce is a commonly recognized coordinate system, the shared structural form in which the market's pricing decisions get made and defended. Once that coordinate system is established, the decision surface is no longer one tool among several. It is the way the market communicates with itself about price.
This is the same pattern that produced Bloomberg, Reuters, GitHub, and other infrastructure plays. A decision surface either tips and consolidates into the recognized coordinate system or stays small and gets absorbed. The middle outcome is rare.
Whichever platform wins, the surface they host has to satisfy two interlocking layers of conditions. The first layer is architectural: the technical properties the methodology has to have for any institutional decision-maker to act on its outputs. The second layer is procurement: the institutional bar that LPACs, auditors, regulators, banks, and insurers apply to those outputs. The two layers are not interchangeable. The architecture produces the procurement output. The procurement defines what the architecture has to deliver. They are documented in detail in the two companion papers (The Decision Surface and The defendable price). They are introduced here as one integrated set.
The four architectural conditions are the technical properties of the methodology layer, set out in detail in The Decision Surface.
Traceable data. Every quantitative input must link back to a primary source. Without this, the surface is not auditable in front of an LPAC or an institutional IC, and a surface that cannot be inspected cannot host a decision.
Consistency. Same inputs must produce the same outputs, every time. The valuation logic must be encoded as deterministic computation using IPEV-compliant models, not re-derived by an analyst or a generative AI on each run. A surface that produces different outputs to the same question is not a shared coordinate system.
Persistent company memory. The surface must produce a per-company knowledge base that accumulates across runs. The same company comes back into focus every quarter, and the surface that remembers gets used. The surface that forgets gets rebuilt every time, which means it does not consolidate.
Inspectable, decomposed, configurable outputs. Every assumption and every scenario weight must live in an open Excel cell that the recipient can change. A buyer who wants to test what happens if revenue compresses 20% or if the IPO scenario weight halves must be able to do that without asking the vendor. This is what makes the surface a shared coordinate system rather than a single-vendor opinion.
The fourth condition is the one that distinguishes a real decision surface from a sophisticated dashboard. A surface that produces a single number for every viewer, no matter how well-engineered, is a forecast dressed up as one. The decision surface has to let different observers (buyer, seller, LP, GP, auditor) collapse the same scenario set into their own weighted view, and surface the disagreement rather than hiding it. That is what makes the surface useful to all of them simultaneously.
The six procurement pillars are the institutional bar applied to the outputs, set out in detail in The defendable price.
Process and governance. A designated valuation function, separate from portfolio management, with documented authority. A valuation committee with recorded decisions. A specific conflict-of-interest map. A written policies manual. A material risk assessment. An ad hoc valuation trigger framework. The institutional procurement floor.
Independence. Either a credentialed external valuer with stated qualifications and explicit liability, or a functionally separate internal team with periodic third-party verification. Named appraisers holding ASA, ABV, CFA, or equivalent credentials. For GP-led secondaries, an independent fairness or valuation opinion with disclosure of business relationships in the prior two years.
Methodology integrity. Triangulation of at least two methods, calibrated at inception so model output equals entry price, and recalibrated at each measurement date with updated inputs. Documented unobservable inputs with ranges. Sensitivity analysis. No cost-basis carry beyond the brief period when cost remains the best evidence of fair value.
Frequency. Quarterly minimum, NAV struck no later than 60 days after quarter-end. Daily, weekly, or monthly for NAV-as-transaction-price vehicles. Mandatory re-marking on material events within 30 days. Public-comp dislocation triggers that automatically force ad hoc review.
Transparency and disclosure. Per-investment methodology disclosure. Unobservable inputs as ranges, not point estimates. Sensitivity tables. Period-over-period NAV bridge. Third-party valuer identity and independence status. NAV-facility disclosure at fund level. ILPA Reporting Template and Performance Template adoption.
Calibration to observable market signals. Mandatory consideration of recent secondary-market evidence on the underlying fund, sponsor, vintage, or sector. A rebuttable presumption that material divergences between secondary clearing prices and GP-reported NAV must be explained on the record, with auditor sign-off. Public-comp beta adjustment for daily and monthly NAV vehicles. Calibration to recent priced rounds with explicit decay logic. Reconciliation of continuation-vehicle pricing to prior NAV and to LP-led evidence.
The architecture produces the procurement output. The four architectural conditions are the technical preconditions of the six procurement pillars. Traceable data is what makes calibration to observable market signals possible. Consistency is what makes methodology integrity defensible. Persistent company memory is what makes per-investment disclosure scalable. Inspectable, decomposed, configurable outputs are what make the independence and transparency conditions practically achievable for the LP, auditor, or regulator inspecting the surface. The architecture is not separable from the procurement bar. It is what the procurement bar runs on.
The integrated framework requires both layers simultaneously. A surface that satisfies the architecture but not the procurement is a research tool. A surface that claims procurement compliance but lacks the architecture is a checkbox. The platforms that win the consolidation race host a surface that satisfies both. That is the value entity that consolidates the market: not the decision, not the price, but the two as one inseparable layer.
A note on completeness
The conditions above describe properties of the methodology and the procurement bar. They presuppose an input layer that is as comprehensive as the available information allows. Late-stage private markets are characterized by information asymmetry. Some parties know more than others, and some information genuinely cannot be obtained from outside the company. A defendable methodology cannot pretend the asymmetry away. What it can do is systematically gather every publicly available signal across every relevant company vector: filings, expert transcripts, professional databases, public web, dated commentary, transaction records, and NDA-protected materials when access is permitted. The goal is to resolve as much of the asymmetry as public information allows, and to make explicit which inputs were considered, which were excluded, and what was beyond reach. This is a precondition for both layers, not an additional layer alongside them.
The consolidation thesis has practical implications for everyone in the market. We do not predict outcomes for any specific participant. We observe the structural pressure each category is facing and the procurement direction that pressure points toward.
Direct-secondary marketplaces are the category most directly positioned for consolidation. The institutional clients on these platforms are already asking the questions that the tape cannot answer: what scenarios am I underwriting, what was the last primary round implicitly pricing in, can I show my IC how the price decomposes, can I defend the mark to my LPAC. Hosting an integrated decision-and-price surface, whether built or embedded, is the move that turns a marketplace into a market. The platforms that move first set the gravitational pull.
Marketplace-derived indices and data providers have a different version of the same opportunity. The integrated surface extends the addressable surface beyond what tape and index products cover. Reference-data providers are well-positioned to host it but typically need to add the marketplace counterparty connectivity and the procurement-grade defendable pricing that turns reference levels into transactional context.
VC GPs running tenders and continuation vehicles face the most acute regulatory pressure. A fairness-opinion process built only on tape data is structurally weaker than one built on a decision surface that includes scenarios, weights, primary-round baselines, and explicit secondary-market calibration. The SEC fairness rule, AIFMD II, the FCA's review, and the ILPA standards all push toward this integrated entity, not toward more tape.
Institutional LP buyers and sellers are the category for whom the integrated entity most clearly bridges existing infrastructure gaps. Stale GP NAVs and noisy SPV prints are not the only references available. An LP that applies its own weighting to the same scenarios its GP uses can surface the disagreement as a structured conversation rather than a hidden one. The same data unlocks Solvency II LTEI capital efficiency for insurer LPs, more accurate denominator-effect rebalancing for pension LPs, and cleaner re-up diligence for everyone.
409A providers, audit teams, and PCA banks face procurement pressure that is moving fast. Single-number determinations are increasingly difficult to defend. A scenario range with explicit drivers, explicit weights, and explicit calibration to observable market signals is the procurement answer. The bank PCA practices and Big Four audit teams that build or embed the integrated surface first will be unusually well positioned versus competitors that wait.
Broker-dealer and matching networks have the most natural use case for embedded surface infrastructure. Network value compounds when buyer-side participants close deals faster, and that compounding depends on underwriting confidence and price defensibility the network itself does not currently provide.
Late-stage private-company issuers running their own liquidity programs set the price benchmark for the entire market. The top 20 names accounted for roughly 95% of Q3 secondary volume. The way these companies design their tender programs, including the methodology under which prices get set, has cascading effects on how the rest of the market clears. Issuers that anchor their tenders to a defendable surface raise the procurement bar for everyone else.
This paper is a snapshot of how we read the market today. We are aware that any market-structure note written from a single vantage point is necessarily partial. Several of the participants named in section 3 have positioning we have read about but not heard directly. Several may have moved further or differently than the public record reflects. Some may have a fundamentally different read of the consolidation trajectory than ours.
We would rather get the paper right than get it published. The next version will incorporate corrections, additions, and counter-arguments from any participant who wishes to engage. Specific invitations:
Subsequent versions of this paper will treat substantive participant input as the primary source of update. The aim is for this document to become a collaborative reference for how the consolidation race is unfolding, not a one-sided commentary on it.
The late-stage private secondary market is consolidating. The forces driving the consolidation are documented and present. The categories of participant positioned to compete are visible. The mechanism by which decision surfaces consolidate, rather than fragment, is the same one that produced Bloomberg, GitHub, and every comparable infrastructure consolidation in adjacent markets. The architectural conditions a winning surface must satisfy are inspectable. The procurement pillars an institutional decision-maker requires are documented.
The decision surface and the defendable price are not two creatures. They are one value entity seen from two angles. The Decision Surface (the methodology paper) documents the architecture. The defendable price (the procurement paper) documents the institutional bar. This paper, Bloomberg moment, frames the market consolidation that decides who hosts the integrated entity. Three papers, one thesis.
We have spent more than three years building Arcanis as the underlying integrated decision-and-price infrastructure that platforms can embed. We are not a competitor to the tape, the marketplace, the broker network, or the bank PCA practice. We are the infrastructure layer any of them can host to position themselves to win the consolidation race.
The next three years will decide which platforms host the integrated entity and which become inputs to it. The decisions are being made now.
Arcanis is decision surface and defendable pricing infrastructure for late-stage private companies. The two are one offering, not two. Built and used inside an active VC secondary fund. Available to host platforms via API, embed, white-label hub, and inspectable Excel.
The full methodology specification is documented in The Decision Surface: A methodology for scenario pricing in late-stage private markets.
The institutional procurement framework is documented in The defendable price.
The neutral, open standard that grades methodology reliability across the industry is the SII Methodology Paper, to which Arcanis is an initial contributor with no controlling vote.
PitchBook 2025 Annual US VC Secondary Market Watch. Wellington Management VC Outlook 2026. Cambridge Associates 2026 Outlook. Industry Ventures interviews with Hans Swildens (World of DaaS, Transacted, TechCrunch). IMD Business School April 2026 analysis. Manhattan Venture Partners (MVP) April 2026 "Secondary is Primary" panel on the growth of secondaries, with Tom Callahan / NPM, Eric Yi / Citi, Jared Carmel / MVP, and Jason Saltzman / CB Insights. Jefferies H1 2025 Global Secondary Market Review and 2024 Secondary Market Volume Review. Equitybee 2025 VC Liquidity Tracker. ILPA Continuation Funds Guidance 2023, ILPA Reporting Template and Performance Template (January 2025), ILPA NAV-Based Facilities Guidance (2024), ILPA Principles 3.0. SEC Private Fund Adviser Rules August 2023 (partially vacated 2024). SEC Investor Advisory Committee September 2025 recommendations. SEC Rule 2a-5 (December 2020). SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda's remarks at SIFMA Private Markets Valuation Roundtable, September 2025. NewView Capital, GSA Ventures, StepStone, Equidam, Sacra, and Chronograph published research. CFA Institute private markets transparency survey. Founders Circle legal guide to secondaries. AIFMD (Directive 2011/61/EU) Article 19. AIFMD II (Directive (EU) 2024/927). UK FCA "Private market valuation practices" multi-firm review, 5 March 2025. PRA "Dear CRO" letter on Private Equity Related Financing Activities, 23 April 2024. ECB Financial Stability Review, May 2024. IMF Global Financial Stability Report, April 2024. IOSCO CR/05/2025 consultation on Valuing Collective Investment Schemes. IPEV Guidelines, December 2022 and December 2025 update. AICPA Practice Aid (2013, updated 2019). FASB ASC 820 and IFRS 13. April 2025 investor advocate letter to FASB on the NAV practical expedient. Anson (2024) "Amortizing Volatility Across Private Capital Investments," Journal of Portfolio Management. CFA Institute and Morningstar coverage of volatility laundering. Charles Schwab and Forge Global press releases (November 2025, March 2026); Goldman Sachs and Industry Ventures press releases (October 2025, January 2026); Morgan Stanley and EquityZen press releases (October 2025, January 2026). Bloomberg LP / Bloomberg Terminal historical and revenue data via public reporting.
This note is market commentary intended for institutional and professional audiences. It is not investment advice and should not be relied upon as the basis for any investment decision. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual outcomes may differ materially. Categorizations of named participants are observational and subject to revision in light of input from those participants. © 2026 Arcanis. All rights reserved.
Issued May 2026. The Bloomberg moment paper is updated to reflect publication of The defendable price (the procurement framework) as a sibling to The Decision Surface (the methodology paper). The decision surface and the defendable price are now articulated as one value entity. The substantive changes below preserve every paragraph of v1.0 that did not need to move.
Summary of changes:
What did not change: the seven categories of participant (Section 3, only the closing completeness paragraph lightly updated); the consolidation mechanism (Section 4); the participant invitation structure (Section 7); the four architectural conditions in Section 5 (kept verbatim, with the six procurement pillars added alongside, not in place of).
Subsequent versions will continue to incorporate substantive participant input. The change log is the canonical record of what has moved.
