ASEANLiquiditySecondary Markets

Startup secondaries market heats up, prompting Forge to seek own listing

By September 14, 2021December 5th, 2023No Comments

The secondaries market in Southeast Asia will no doubt continue to heat up, and it will be interesting to see which of the emergent marketplaces will rise to the top. Forge has entered the conversation in a big way after announcing its merger with Motive Capital Corp., which gives the new company a fully diluted equity value of $2 billion when it begins publicly trading in Q4 2021 or Q1 2022.

However, it’s worth noting that Forge already has more than 123,000 accredited investors currently onboarded and has traded private shares in more than 400 companies since its inception. They also have juggernaut investor Temasek on their cap table, which is great news for this region.

Forge joins Nasdaq Private Market and EquityZen, two other leading secondaries platforms, in what is becoming an increasingly crowded space globally.

As companies mature across Southeast Asia, secondary transactions are very important as a means of rewarding early employees and empowering early-stage investors to continue building new enterprises and backing upstart founding teams.

And with the Southeast Asian internet economy expected to hit $300 billion in GMV by 2025, you can bet that many more companies will go public before then, albeit at (possibly) more restrained valuations than we are currently seeing.