Private Company Trading Volume Hits $106 Billion as Finance Chiefs Navigate Opaque Market
The market for buying and selling shares in private companies surged to an estimated $106.3 billion in 2025, according to new PitchBook data, but the actual size remains anyone's guess—and that uncertainty is becoming a problem for CFOs trying to manage liquidity and valuations.
The explosion in secondary trading reflects a structural shift in corporate finance: companies are staying private longer, traditional exits have stalled, and investors are scrambling for creative ways to return cash to limited partners. But unlike public markets where every trade is reported, the secondaries market operates largely in the shadows, with few disclosure requirements and deals often struck with incomplete information.
PitchBook estimates that U.S. direct secondaries alone accounted for between $62.5 billion and $120.9 billion in 2025—a $58 billion range that exceeds the entire global market for soap. The firm's midpoint estimate of $91.7 billion for direct secondaries, combined with $14.6 billion in GP-led venture secondaries, produces the $106.3 billion total. For context, the entire secondaries market in 2024 was roughly $50 billion.
The staggering margin of error isn't sloppiness—it's a feature of the market itself. With minimal reporting requirements, even sophisticated data providers can only approximate activity. Some transactions flow through major Wall Street institutions; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Charles Schwab all made acquisitions in 2025 to expand their secondary operations, typically handling hundred-million-dollar stakes in companies like defense tech firm Anduril.
But much of the market runs through smaller brokerages, sometimes just one or two people connecting buyers willing to invest a few hundred thousand dollars. The FOMO dynamic mirrors public markets—if you believe in OpenAI's future, you want exposure, disclosure be damned—except nothing gets publicly reported.
The trading is wildly concentrated. On private stock marketplace Hiive, the top 20 startups accounted for 86.4% of secondary trading value in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to PitchBook. The top five companies—names like OpenAI and SpaceX—represented 55.6% of that volume alone.
For finance chiefs at private companies, this creates a peculiar challenge: secondary market pricing increasingly influences internal valuations and employee equity expectations, yet the data driving those prices is fragmentary at best. And PitchBook's estimate is "almost definitely conservative," suggesting the real market could be substantially larger—an elephant-sized black box that corporate finance teams are navigating largely blind.
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