Earlyasset has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding as it emerges from stealth to address growing liquidity challenges in private markets, where trillions of dollars in startup equity remain difficult to access. The round was led by New Stack Ventures with participation from Cervin Ventures, Andrew Ryan of Alex Brown Venture Capital Services, and several angel investors.
The company is developing infrastructure to simplify and expand secondary transactions in venture-backed companies, targeting a market increasingly constrained by extended private company lifecycles and limited exit opportunities. According to analysis from Blackstone, the average time companies remain private has stretched from about six years in 2000 to roughly 14 years today.
As a result, more than $4 trillion in private company value is held across the venture ecosystem, with millions of shareholders lacking efficient ways to convert equity into cash. Despite this scale, over 80 percent of secondary transaction volume is concentrated in just ten companies, leaving the vast majority of shareholders without viable liquidity options.
Earlyasset is positioning itself as infrastructure rather than a traditional marketplace, combining capital deployment, pricing intelligence, and transaction execution to reduce friction in private share sales. The platform aims to lower legal and administrative costs, which can exceed $10,000 per transaction, and shorten deal timelines that often stretch beyond three months.
The company plans to introduce proprietary valuation tools to improve price transparency, a key barrier in private markets where shareholders often lack clear visibility into the worth of their holdings. It also intends to participate directly in transactions by deploying capital alongside buyers, thereby expanding liquidity beyond the most actively traded companies.
Earlyasset will launch later this year, with a waitlist opening for shareholders to register private holdings, access pricing insights, and request liquidity as the platform builds its investor network.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
“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. 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.”
Shawn Bercuson, Co-Founder And CEO, Earlyasset
“These structural dynamics are creating a real liquidity challenge across the startup ecosystem. 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.”
Nick Moran, General Partner, New Stack Ventures
