Forge Global

Cover Block

PUBLIC

Field	Value
Name	Forge Global
Tagline	Leading secondary marketplace for buying and selling pre-IPO private company shares
Headquarters	San Francisco, CA
Stage	Public (NYSE: FRGE)
Business Model	Marketplace
Industry	Fintech / Private Securities
Technology Type	Software (Non-AI)
Geography	North America
Growth Profile	Venture Scale
Funding Label	$100M+
Total Disclosed	~$250,000,000 across 6 rounds [Tracxn]

Links

PUBLIC

• Website: https://forgeglobal.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/forgeglobal
• Investor / Public Filings: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FRGE/

Executive Summary

PUBLIC

Forge Global operates one of the most established secondary marketplaces for pre-IPO private company shares, a category that has gained renewed institutional relevance as IPO windows have lengthened and late-stage private valuations have become increasingly important to fund returns [Forge Global][Institutional Investor]. The company was formed through the 2020 merger of Forge and SharesPost, two of the earliest entrants in private-share trading, and went public in 2022 via a SPAC combination with Motive Capital Corp at an enterprise value initially pegged near $2 billion [Reuters][Crunchbase News]. Its core offering connects accredited investors, employee shareholders, and institutional buyers around a centralized order book backed by proprietary pricing data covering roughly 200 pre-IPO companies [Forge Global]. The institutional product set has expanded beyond pure execution: Forge Pro, an order management system for institutional brokers, launched with 15+ customers, and Forge Intelligence now incorporates 8,642 public fund marks sourced from 95 funds across 282 issuers [Forge Global]. Reported revenue reached $92.88 million on a trailing-twelve-month basis through September 30, 2025, up 16.40% year-over-year, with the September 2025 quarter posting $21.26 million [5,2026]. Total revenue less transaction-based expenses, a metric the company emphasizes, reached $27.6 million in Q2 2025 [6,2026]. Over the next 12 to 18 months, the items worth tracking are Forge Pro adoption among institutional desks, the monetization curve of the data business as private-market benchmarks gain currency, and competitive pressure from venue-style entrants such as Hiive that are challenging the traditional broker-led model.

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Forge Global press releases, Reuters, Crunchbase News, and SEC filings.

Taxonomy Snapshot

Axis	Value
Stage	Public (post-SPAC, NYSE: FRGE)
Business Model	Marketplace + Data subscriptions
Industry / Vertical	Fintech / Private Securities
Technology Type	Software (Non-AI)
Geography	North America (HQ San Francisco)
Growth Profile	Venture Scale, public-market listed
Funding	~$250M total disclosed across 6 rounds [Tracxn]

Company Overview

PUBLIC

Forge Global's modern form dates to the 2020 combination of two pioneers in the private-share secondary market. Forge, originally known as Equidate, and SharesPost, founded in 2009, announced their merger in 2020 to create what was then the largest unified marketplace for pre-IPO equity, consolidating order flow that had previously been fragmented across competing platforms [Crunchbase News]. Headquartered in San Francisco, the merged entity positioned itself to serve the full stack of private-market participants: employees seeking liquidity on vested equity, accredited individual investors looking for exposure to late-stage names, and institutional desks at hedge funds, private equity firms, venture capital firms, and family offices [Forge Global].

The defining corporate event was the March 2022 listing on the New York Stock Exchange via a SPAC merger with Motive Capital Corp, an Apollo-affiliated vehicle, in a transaction initially valued at roughly $2 billion [Reuters][Crunchbase News]. The listing made Forge one of the few publicly traded operators of private-securities infrastructure, a structural distinction that has shaped its disclosure cadence and competitive narrative ever since. Subsequent milestones have centered on building data and institutional-grade execution products: the September 2024 launch of Forge Price, a daily indicative price for around 200 pre-IPO companies that is now embedded into Forge Pro and Forge Data products [Business Wire]; the rollout of Forge Pro as an institutional order management system with 15+ launch customers [Forge Global]; and a partnership with Fortune Media to publish private market lists and rankings [12,2026]. Cumulative funding across the company's pre-IPO life is reported at approximately $250 million across six rounds [Tracxn].

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Reuters, Crunchbase News, Business Wire, and Forge Global filings.

Product and Technology

MIXED

Forge's product surface divides into three connected lines: marketplace execution, institutional trading tools, and data. The marketplace itself is the historical core, allowing accredited buyers and verified sellers to transact in private company shares with what the company describes as "real-time pricing, historical trends, and contextual market signals" [Forge Global]. For employee shareholders, the platform offers structured liquidity programs run in coordination with issuers, and for institutional users it provides direct access to order flow and indications of interest across a broad universe of late-stage names [Forge Global].

On the institutional side, Forge Pro is positioned as an order management system specifically built for trading private company securities, an asset class that has historically been intermediated through email, chat, and bilateral broker relationships. The product launched with 15+ customers and integrates Forge Price for daily indicative valuations [Forge Global][Business Wire]. Forge Data, the analytics arm, has been progressively enhanced: the Forge Intelligence module now exposes 8,642 public fund marks drawn from 95 funds across 282 issuers, giving subscribers a triangulation point between marketplace prints and how institutional limited partners are valuing the same companies on their own books [Forge Global]. Volume-weighted average pricing for private stocks (VWAP), originally a Forge Data feature, has been extended to Forge Markets clients [Forge Global].

The differentiation rests less on a novel technology layer and more on accumulated proprietary data: years of executed trade prints, fund-mark coverage, and the indicative pricing methodology behind Forge Price. The competitive question, examined later, is whether that dataset is durable as newer venue-style entrants compete on transparency and lower frictional cost.

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Forge Global press releases and Business Wire.

Market Research and Opportunity

PUBLIC

The private secondary market matters now because companies are staying private materially longer than they did a decade ago, leaving an estimated multi-trillion-dollar pool of late-stage equity locked up between primary financing rounds and eventual IPOs. Forge sits directly in that liquidity gap.

The demand drivers are reasonably well documented in the cited reporting. Employee shareholders at long-private unicorns increasingly need liquidity events that do not depend on an IPO calendar, while institutional buyers, including crossover funds and family offices, want exposure to names like SpaceX, Stripe, Anthropic, and Databricks that are not yet available on public exchanges [Forge Global][Institutional Investor]. Forge's own published lists of "highest investor demand" companies illustrate the concentration of flow into a relatively small set of marquee names [Forge Global]. The launch of Forge Price was framed by the company as an attempt to bring public-equities-style price transparency to a market that has historically operated on stale 409A valuations and last-round marks [Business Wire][Institutional Investor].

Adjacent and substitute markets shape the addressable opportunity. Tender offer programs run directly by issuers compete with marketplace-mediated liquidity. Direct lending against private shares, structured products, and fund-of-funds vehicles all offer alternative paths to pre-IPO exposure. Regulatory posture is the most consequential variable: the SEC has periodically signaled scrutiny of private-securities trading platforms and the boundaries of accredited-investor exemptions, and any expansion or contraction of who can buy unregistered securities would directly reshape Forge's serviceable market.

Because no third-party TAM figure is cited in the captured research, the table below summarizes the confirmed scale indicators rather than a market-sizing estimate.

Metric	Value	Source
Pre-IPO companies with daily Forge Price coverage	~200	[Forge Global]
Public fund marks in Forge Intelligence	8,642	[Forge Global]
Funds contributing marks	95	[Forge Global]
Issuers covered by fund marks	282	[Forge Global]
Forge LTM revenue (through Sep 30, 2025)	$92.88M, +16.4% YoY	[5,2026]

Analyst takeaway: the data footprint (200 priced names, 282 issuers covered by fund marks) is the most defensible asset Forge has built, and the +16.4% LTM revenue growth suggests the secondary-market thaw of 2024-2025 is translating into measurable top-line recovery rather than only sentiment.

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Forge Global, Business Wire, and Institutional Investor.

Competitive Landscape

MIXED

Forge competes in a small, identifiable set of private-share venues, each with a distinct execution model and go-to-market posture.

Company	Positioning	Stage / Funding	Notable Differentiator	Source
Forge Global	Full-stack marketplace + data + institutional OMS	Public, ~$250M raised pre-IPO [Tracxn]	Forge Price across ~200 names; 8,642 fund marks in Forge Intelligence	[Forge Global][Tracxn]
EquityZen	Accredited-investor marketplace; fund vehicles around single names	Private, venture-backed	Pooled investment vehicles giving smaller-ticket access	[CB Insights]
Hiive	Bid/ask order-book venue with public price transparency	Private, venture-backed	Live order-book model with displayed pricing	[CB Insights]
Secfi	Employee-focused liquidity and equity financing	Private, venture-backed	Loans against private shares for employee exercise	[CB Insights]

At the segment level, the map breaks into three groups. The institutional-execution segment is where Forge Pro competes most directly with the broker desks at firms like Setter Capital and Industry Ventures' secondary practice; the retail-accredited segment is where EquityZen has historically been strongest, particularly through its single-name funds; and the venue/transparency segment is where Hiive has staked the most aggressive position by publishing live bids and offers, a structural choice Forge has only partially mirrored.

Forge's defensible edges today are real but uneven. The data assets (Forge Price across roughly 200 names plus 8,642 fund marks across 282 issuers) are difficult for a younger competitor to replicate without comparable years of trade flow [Forge Global]. The public listing provides a regulatory and disclosure track record that institutional counterparties value, and the SharesPost integration left Forge with a long historical price tape. What is more perishable is the execution-monopoly narrative: Hiive's order-book model directly attacks the opacity that traditional broker-led platforms have relied on for spread, and if institutional buyers come to prefer displayed liquidity, the data moat alone will not preserve trading share.

The exposure points are specific. Hiive's transparency-first venue is the most direct structural threat to Forge's marketplace economics; EquityZen's fund-vehicle product gives smaller accredited buyers a lower-friction wrapper that Forge does not directly mirror at the same scale; and Secfi's lending business owns the employee-exercise relationship before a share ever reaches a marketplace. None of these competitors has Forge's combined data plus public-company status, but each has a sharper edge in its chosen lane.

The most plausible 18-month scenario: Forge wins if Forge Pro becomes a standard OMS for the institutional secondaries desk and Forge Price gains acceptance as a benchmark referenced by LP marks, in which case data subscription revenue compounds independently of trade volume. Forge loses share if Hiive's order-book model captures incremental institutional flow during a period of high secondary activity, leaving Forge with a slower-growth data business attached to a stagnant marketplace.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Competitor positioning corroborated by CB Insights and company sites; specific share-of-volume comparisons are not publicly disclosed.

Opportunity

PUBLIC

If Forge executes against its data and institutional-execution thesis, the prize is becoming the default pricing and trading infrastructure for an asset class that institutional allocators are still in the early innings of treating as a real, benchmarkable category.

The headline opportunity. The single largest outcome Forge could plausibly become is the Bloomberg-style reference layer for private late-stage equity: the venue where the indicative price is set, the data feed institutional risk systems consume, and the OMS through which broker-dealers route private-share orders. The cited evidence makes this reachable rather than aspirational. Forge Price already covers approximately 200 pre-IPO names with daily indicative valuations [Forge Global], Forge Intelligence aggregates 8,642 fund marks across 282 issuers [Forge Global], and the Fortune Media partnership to publish private-market lists and rankings provides a distribution channel into mainstream financial media [12,2026]. Public-company status and SEC reporting cadence add an institutional-grade credibility layer that smaller venues cannot easily match.

Growth scenarios.

Scenario	What happens	Catalyst	Why it's plausible
Become the benchmark layer	Forge Price is referenced in LP fund marks and risk systems the way IHS Markit prices are referenced for credit	Adoption by 2-3 large LPs or fund administrators citing Forge Price in NAV calculations	Forge already aggregates 8,642 fund marks and publishes daily indicative prices on ~200 names [Forge Global]
Win the institutional OMS standard	Forge Pro becomes the default order management system for secondary-desk execution at major broker-dealers	Expansion of the 15+ launch customer base into top-20 secondary desks	Forge Pro launched with 15+ customers and integrates Forge Price natively [Forge Global][Business Wire]
Capture the IPO-window thaw	A reopened IPO market drives a surge of pre-IPO trading and Forge captures a disproportionate share through scale	Multiple top-decile pre-IPO names (SpaceX, Stripe, Databricks-tier) printing meaningful secondary volume	LTM revenue already +16.4% YoY through Sep 2025 [5,2026], suggesting the cycle is turning

What compounding looks like. The flywheel for Forge is data-led rather than purely transactional. Each marketplace trade generates a price print, which feeds Forge Price, which strengthens the data product, which attracts institutional subscribers who then route order flow back through Forge Pro, which in turn produces more prints. The fund-mark layer (8,642 marks across 95 funds) compounds this by adding non-transactional valuation evidence, making the dataset useful even in low-volume quarters [Forge Global]. The Q2 2025 figure of $27.6 million in revenue less transaction-based expenses is the early signal that the non-transaction economics are scaling [6,2026]. The Fortune Media partnership extends the brand surface for the data product into a broader allocator audience [12,2026].

The size of the win. A useful comparable is the public-markets data and execution stack: the firms that own the reference price for an asset class (think pricing services in fixed income, or index providers in equities) tend to trade at premium multiples relative to pure-transaction venues because their revenue is recurring and embedded in client workflows. Forge's current LTM revenue of $92.88 million [5,2026] sits well below the scale at which such a re-rating typically occurs, but if the data and OMS lines continue to grow faster than the transaction line, the mix shift alone changes the company's profile. The category-defining outcome is not measured in next-quarter revenue but in whether, three to five years from now, an LP marking a private fund or a broker routing a secondary order considers Forge's data and venue the reference rather than one option among several.

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Forge Global press releases, Business Wire, and reported financials.

Sources

PUBLIC

1. [Forge Global] Welcome To Forge - The Place To Buy And Sell Private Market Shares | https://forgeglobal.com/

2. [Forge Global] Forge - We Are Private Market Innovators | https://forgeglobal.com/about/

3. [Forge Global] Forge Solutions for Individual Investors | https://forgeglobal.com/who-we-serve/investors/

4. [Forge Global] Browse companies, Valuations, Same Day Pricing & More | https://forgeglobal.com/search-companies/

5. [Forge Global] Forge Releases Enhanced User Experience For Data Clients | https://forgeglobal.com/press-releases/forge-releases-enhanced-user-experience-for-data-clients/

6. [Forge Global] Forge Releases Forge Pro, an Institutional Trade Order Management System | https://forgeglobal.com/press-releases/forge-pro-institutional-trade-order-management-system/

7. [Business Wire] Forge Global Announces Forge Price | https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240926599111/en/Forge-Global-Announces-Forge-Price-A-New-Standard-for-Pricing-Pre-IPO-Venture-Backed-Late-Stage-Companies-Now-Integrated-into-Forge-Pro-and-Related-Data-Products

8. [Business Wire] Forge Global Holdings, Inc. Reports Preliminary First Quarter Fiscal Year 2025 Results | https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250410939931/en/Forge-Global-Holdings-Inc.-Reports-Preliminary-First-Quarter-Fiscal-Year-2025-Results

9. [Reuters] Private securities marketplace Forge Global to go public via $2 billion SPAC deal | https://www.reuters.com/article/forge-global-m-a-motive-capital-corp/private-securities-marketplace-forge-global-to-go-public-via-2-billion-spac-deal-idUSKBN2G91DF/

10. [Crunchbase News] Forge Global Makes Trading Debut After SPAC Merger | https://news.crunchbase.com/public/forge-global-spac-frge/

11. [Crunchbase News] SharesPost And Forge Global To Merge | https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/sharespost-and-forge-global-to-merge/

12. [Crunchbase] Forge - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/forge-global

13. [LinkedIn] Forge | LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/company/forgeglobal

14. [Tracxn] Forge Global - 2026 Company Profile, Team, Funding & Competitors | https://tracxn.com/d/companies/forge-global/__Kcx30_hnMDG60hIJBihtwPYhRDkA_gM9A0oumQVlU3s

15. [Institutional Investor] Forge Brings VC Secondary Market a Small Step Closer to Public Stocks | https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2d0ql2muhrytr3k811r0g/corner-office/forge-brings-vc-secondary-market-a-small-step-closer-to-public-stocks

16. [Yahoo Finance] Forge Global Holdings, Inc. (FRGE) Stock Price, News, Quote & History | https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FRGE/

17. [SEC] forge-20220630 | https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1827821/000162828022022682/forge-20220630.htm

18. [CB Insights] Forge Global - Products, Competitors, Financials, Employees, Headquarters Locations | https://www.cbinsights.com/company/equidate