Opinion
The line between public and private markets is blurring , and venture secondaries are at the center
"For Israel to keep building global companies, we need to continue embracing the same liquidity infrastructure the world’s biggest institutions are now investing in," writes Dror Glass, Founding Managing Partner at Israel Secondary Fund (ISF).
When I co-founded Israel Secondary Fund (ISF) more than a decade ago, I looked closely at Industry Ventures, a US pioneer in venture secondaries, as a model for what we hoped to build in Israel.
Last month, Goldman Sachs bought Industry Ventures outright, a premier venture secondary player.
For me, that headline was both personal and symbolic: Venture secondaries, the same niche that inspired ISF’s creation, has now become core infrastructure for one of the world’s largest banks.
It also says something about where Israel’s tech ecosystem is today. We built a leading global tech ecosystem, our companies are bigger, they remain private longer. The real constraint today is not funding, its liquidity, and that’s where Israel still lags behind the more mature tech markets.
A trio of acquisitions that tell a bigger story
In the last month three landmark transactions reshaped the global conversation about venture secondaries:
First, Goldman Sachs announced its acquisition of Industry Ventures for up to $1B, bringing a venture-secondary specialist inside one of the world’s largest banks with a leading global secondary platform.
Soon after, Morgan Stanley agreed to acquire EquityZen for up to $600M, expanding its private-markets offering for wealth clients and institutions and tightening the bridge between private assets and public-style liquidity.
And most recently, Charles Schwab agreed to acquire Forge Global - a $660M bet on retail-access secondary trading and a clear signal that private shares are moving toward mainstream portfolios.
Together, these deals show that the world’s largest financial institutions now view venture secondaries as a must-have competency.
Why banks are buying expertise, not building it
It’s tempting to read these deals as banks simply expanding their secondary-trading footprint. But venture secondaries require very different muscles: access to founders and early investors, pattern-recognition around young companies and industries, the ability to assess layered risk and fast, creative execution.
That’s why Goldman, despite running one of the world’s largest secondary platforms, chose to acquire Industry Ventures rather than replicate the capability internally. You can scale capital quickly. You can’t scale over two decades of relationships and early-stage intuition the same way.
In addition, data is becoming a key success factor in our industry. Through these secondary platforms, banks get earlier and deeper indications on what’s happening across the global tech ecosystem: who is raising, who is looking to acquire or be acquired, and which founders have recently exited and may need wealth-management support. These insights can be leveraged across their entire platform, and that’s why they’re willing to pay premium acquisition prices.
Liquidity is scaling - and so is demand
While the broader secondaries market is expecting to reach over $200B this year (~2% of global PE AUM), venture secondaries remain the fastest-growing segments of this market.
The reasons are straightforward:
- Companies now stay private 10-12 years on average.
- As the VC market matured and LPs bases have broadened, GPs increasingly need timely liquidity.
- Secondaries enable managers to actively manage distributions even during slow times.
Primary capital is the fuel of the tech industry, liquidity is not a luxury; it is the oil that keeps capital and innovation moving and reduces the misalignments in this market.
Where Israel fits in
The same forces reshaping Wall Street are reshaping Israel.
Our companies are staying private longer. Our funds are larger. And our investors are facing the same liquidity pressures as their global counterparts. What used to be occasional transactions are now becoming structural: employee liquidity programs, structured secondaries, and continuation vehicles are all showing up in Israel’s market.
Just in the past year, we’ve seen it firsthand, from large employee secondary programs at companies like DriveNets, Cato Networks, and Armis to cross-fund liquidity solutions that allowed early investors to recycle capital into their newest vehicles. These aren’t outliers anymore; they’re becoming part of how Israeli companies operate at scale.
For Israel to keep building global companies, we need to continue embracing the same liquidity infrastructure the world’s biggest institutions are now investing in - the ability to move capital efficiently, give shareholders flexibility, and support companies through longer private lifecycles.
Dror Glass is the Founding Managing Partner at Israel Secondary Fund (ISF)
