On any given trading morning in San Francisco, a hedge fund analyst can pull up Forge Global's terminal and see something that did not exist five years ago: a daily indicative price for roughly 200 pre-IPO companies, calibrated against actual order flow and fund marks. That is the bet Forge Global (NYSE: FRGE) is making, and after a bruising post-SPAC stretch, the numbers suggest the bet is starting to compound.
Forge reported revenue of $92.88 million in the twelve months ending September 30, 2025, up 16.40% year-over-year [Stock Analysis, 2025]. Quarterly revenue hit $21.26 million, growing 10.64% [Stock Analysis, 2025]. Total revenue less transaction-based expenses, the cleaner read on the take rate of the business, reached $27.6 million in Q2 2025 [Business Wire, 2025]. None of this makes Forge a growth darling yet, but it does put the company back into the conversation about who controls the plumbing of the private market.
The bet
Forge sells two things that travel together. The first is a marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of private company shares, with real-time pricing and data insights [Forge Global]. The second is data and tooling sold into institutions: hedge funds, private equity funds, venture firms, and family offices [Forge Global]. The flagship institutional product, Forge Pro, is an order management system for trading private company securities, and it launched with 15 or more customers on the platform [Forge Global]. Forge Price, the company's proprietary indicative quote calibrated daily across approximately 200 issuers, now feeds directly into Pro and the broader data products [Business Wire, September 2024].
The deeper data asset sits inside Forge Intelligence: 8,642 public fund marks from 95 funds across 282 issuers [Forge Global]. That is the kind of dataset that is genuinely hard to assemble, because it requires both the fund relationships and the marketplace flow to triangulate against. It is also the kind of dataset that, if it becomes a reference price the way the S&P 500 became a reference index, accrues quietly powerful network effects.
Why it could be big
The macro setup is friendlier to Forge than it has been in years. Companies are staying private longer. The IPO window has been intermittent. Employees at late-stage startups are sitting on paper wealth they cannot easily monetize, and institutions want exposure to names like SpaceX, Stripe, and Anthropic without waiting for an S-1. That structural mismatch is what created the secondary market in the first place, and it is what feeds rivals like EquityZen, Hiive, and Secfi.
Forge's pitch to institutions is that the secondary market is moving from a relationship-driven phone-call business to something closer to a screen-based market with reference pricing, order management, and analytics. Institutional Investor framed Forge's recent moves as bringing the VC secondary market a small step closer to public stocks [Institutional Investor]. The September partnership with Fortune Media to launch private market lists and rankings is a distribution play in the same direction: get Forge Price embedded as the number people quote [Business Wire, 2025].
If even a fraction of late-stage private equity flow routes through a screen with a public reference price, the operator of that screen captures a meaningful slice of a market that the company values in the trillions of paper equity.
The traction
Forge went public via a $2 billion SPAC merger with Motive Capital Corp [Reuters], and has raised roughly $250 million in total disclosed funding across six rounds [Tracxn]. The company traces its current shape to the merger of Forge and SharesPost, which combined two of the larger private-market venues into a single book [Crunchbase News]. Headline revenue growth into the mid-teens, paired with a tighter focus on institutional products, is the operating story management is selling to public investors right now.
| Metric | Value | Period |
|---|---|---|
| LTM revenue | $92.88M | TTM Sep 30, 2025 |
| Quarterly revenue | $21.26M | Q3 2025 |
| Revenue less transaction expenses | $27.6M | Q2 2025 |
| YoY revenue growth | 16.40% | LTM |
| Total disclosed funding | $250M | All-time |
The honest counterfactual
What bears say: Forge is not the only venue trying to become the screen for private shares. Hiive in particular has gained share with a more open order book model, and EquityZen has a long-running retail-accredited franchise. If price discovery commoditizes and take rates compress, a marketplace with a $90 million revenue base and public-company cost structure has limited room to absorb that pressure.
What bulls answer: pricing data, fund marks, and an institutional OMS are stickier than transaction flow alone. Forge Price integrated into Forge Pro, fed by 8,642 fund marks across 282 issuers [Forge Global], is the kind of bundle that is hard for a pure marketplace to replicate without years of data accumulation. The Fortune partnership signals that Forge intends to compete on becoming the cited reference, not just the cheapest venue [Business Wire, 2025]. Whether that translates into pricing power is the open question on the stock.
What to watch
The next twelve months will turn on three things. First, whether Forge Pro's customer count keeps moving up from the 15-plus disclosed at launch and whether those desks generate measurable trade volume rather than evaluation seats. Second, whether quarterly revenue growth sustains or accelerates beyond the current 10.64% pace, particularly in the data and subscription line that is less exposed to transaction cyclicality. Third, whether a major IPO window reopens, because secondary venues tend to see flow spike both into and out of liquidity events as employees and early investors rebalance.
The bigger strategic prize is whether Forge Price gets quoted by reporters and analysts the way public-company multiples get quoted today. If it does, Forge stops being a marketplace and becomes infrastructure.
So here is the question for readers: in a world where the most valuable companies might stay private for fifteen years, who do you want setting the daily price?