Despite their scale and importance, private markets still operate with fragmented pricing visibility and valuation systems built around periodic reporting cycles rather than continuously updated market intelligence.
That gap has always bothered me. And it’s becoming harder for anyone to justify.
Public equities benefit from continuous pricing signals generated through trading activity, analyst coverage, and market-data infrastructure. Private capital markets still rely heavily on periodic valuation exercises, leaving investors and operators dependent on information that may already be outdated by the time decisions are made. The result is a market with enormous value but limited real-time pricing infrastructure.
That’s exactly what we at Eqvista are building to change.
The Problem I Couldn’t Stop Thinking About
When I started, Eqvista was focused on 409A valuations. Necessary work, but I always saw it as a starting point, not a destination.
For years, private company valuation has been handled as a batch-driven workflow rather than a continuous system. A financing round closes, a 409A process runs, fair market value gets recalculated, or compliance needs for audits and boards trigger a fresh valuation cycle. The output is typically a static report generated for reporting or regulatory purposes, after which it is stored, referenced when needed, and effectively left untouched until the next event-driven update.
But I kept coming back to one simple truth: markets do not stand still between reports.
That realization shaped everything I’ve built since. We are not simply trying to deliver valuations faster. We are trying to move private market participants away from viewing valuation as a one-time document and toward viewing it as a continuous system.
That change fundamentally reshapes how valuation functions. Rather than being confined to compliance workflows, it becomes part of a continuous visibility layer across private markets. Static snapshots give way to evolving signals, enabling companies and investors to access real-time pricing context instead of isolated reference points. Over time, private company value stops behaving like an infrequent, opaque output and instead starts operating more like a persistent market signal that can be tracked, integrated, and acted on in real time.
One thing I’m conscious about is how we balance technology with human assessment. In valuation, credibility matters as much as speed. The market does not just need automation. It needs outputs that are defensible, understandable, and trusted.
That’s why our approach is not to replace decisions with automation, but to use AI to scale and improve workflows while keeping human expertise central to delivery and quality control.
We Outgrew Our Own Category
What we’re building now is much larger than where we started.
From 409A valuations to Preferred Stock Fair Market Value, we are building toward a broader role in private market pricing. We don’t just use valuation models; we build, tune, and continuously improve them. That distinction reflects an ambition that goes beyond service delivery and into market infrastructure.
And that’s where the private market conversation gets really compelling to me.
As pricing systems become more dynamic and continuously updated, private markets gain many of the informational advantages that have historically made public markets more efficient and easier to navigate. And once that happens, the groundwork for greater market liquidity starts to emerge.
Real-time valuation goes beyond being a product feature; it can serve as the foundation for a more functional private market structure.
Eqvista 100: Giving Private Markets a Scoreboard
One of the initiatives I’m most excited about is Eqvista 100. It’s a project designed to value and rank 1,540 unicorns globally through our AI-built valuation engine. Users will be able to see each company’s value, compare them, and click into a company to view its private-market stock ticker. The initiative is built on $2T in proprietary data, which we see as one of our core strategic advantages.
This gap exists because private markets have never had the same comparability infrastructure that defines public markets. Unlike equities, there is no standardized pricing interface for unicorns that anyone can easily access. There is no ticker-like layer that allows users to track private company valuations in a familiar, continuous format. As a result, comparisons between private companies remain fragmented, inconsistent, and heavily dependent on context rather than a shared reference framework.
Eqvista 100 is our answer to that.
Every Private Company Deserves a Ticker
We’ve also figured out how to assign a stock ticker to all private companies on our platform. That may seem like a small interface decision, but it is, in fact, a very big one. Standardized identifiers create a more navigable market structure by making private companies easier to benchmark, monitor, and integrate into financial systems and workflows. They are part of what gives public markets clarity and navigability. Bringing that concept into private markets is one step toward making private-company value feel less like a back-office exercise and more like market reality.
That’s the wider pattern behind everything we do. We’re not just digitizing old valuation processes. We’re gradually adopting the language, structure, and practices of public-market pricing in private market environments.
The Challenge: Building the Product Was the Easy Part
I’ll be honest, the hardest part of building Eqvista isn’t the technology. Infrastructure businesses often face their biggest challenge not in building the product, but in changing behavior.
Private markets are still accustomed to thinking about valuation in static terms. Many participants remain comfortable with reports because that is what the market has always used. Moving to a real-time model requires more than better technology. It requires changing assumptions about what valuation is for.
Our challenge, then, is somewhat educational. We have to convince the market that continuous value visibility is not only possible, but useful and credible. We also have to prove that real-time systems can coexist with the rigor, defensibility, and trust expected in professional valuation work.
By being AI-powered yet always human-delivered, we are making the case that scale and defensibility need not be in conflict. The platform can improve speed and intelligence while still preserving the discipline required in valuation.
We set a Goal of $1 Trillion. We Surprised Even Ourselves
When I set our internal benchmark, our original goal for 2026 was to reach $1 trillion in client assets valued in real time, bringing private-market visibility closer to that in public markets. We have already surpassed that by a wide margin, reaching $2.06 trillion in total value across 9,935 private companies.
This milestone goes beyond simple numerical progress. It points to a potentially stronger-than-anticipated appetite for more responsive valuation infrastructure across private markets. More broadly, it suggests that market participants may already be positioned for a shift toward systems where pricing is treated as continuously updated information, rather than something produced intermittently for reporting or administrative purposes.
What We’re Building Is Bigger Than Valuation Software
Eqvista is often described as a valuation platform. That is accurate, but incomplete.
We are building the pricing layer for private markets, infrastructure that makes private company value more visible, consistent, and usable. Valuation is only the starting point.
Over time, this goes beyond compliance outputs like 409A and fair market value reports. It changes how investors compare companies, how decisions are made, and how value is understood across private markets. It moves private company pricing closer to something continuous rather than episodic.
This is not just a better tool. It is a different way the market can operate.
If this shift continues, the companies building this layer early will not only improve valuation. They will help shape how private markets function in the next era.
Growing up and building businesses in Asia taught me that there’s very little room for failure. The environment forces discipline, urgency, and resilience. You have to deliver, adapt quickly, and keep moving forward. That pressure shaped me as an entrepreneur; it forced me to focus on execution, efficiency, and results. It’s the same mindset I’ve brought to every stage of building Eqvista.
We’re just getting started.
