From the Montgomery Summit: Why Private Markets Need Valuation Infrastructure, Not Just Liquidity

At the Montgomery Summit, I had the opportunity to present Eqvista Real-Time Company Valuation® and share a broader perspective on where private markets are heading. The discussion was not just about our company, but about a structural shift taking place across the entire market: private companies are staying private longer, reaching far greater scale, and creating enormous amounts of value before any public listing ever happens.

At Eqvista, we see that shift directly in the data. Our internal dataset has now surpassed $300 billion in client asset valuation, giving us a front-row view into how private company value is being formed, measured, and managed. That number is important not only because of its size, but because it signals how much economic activity is now happening inside private markets. Our long-term ambition is to help push that figure toward $1 trillion, creating a stronger foundation for pricing transparency and valuation infrastructure in the private economy.

One of the core ideas I emphasized is that pricing discovery is more important than liquidity. For many years, private market conversations have centered almost entirely on liquidity: when a company will go public, when investors can exit, or when employees can sell shares. But liquidity is only one part of the equation. Before there can be efficient liquidity, there must first be credible pricing. If the market cannot determine value in a reliable, continuous, and defensible way, then liquidity alone does not solve the underlying problem.

This is why we believe valuation infrastructure matters so much. In public markets, price discovery happens continuously through trading. In private markets, that process has historically been fragmented, infrequent, and heavily dependent on one-time events. Yet the scale of private companies today demands something more robust. Boards, founders, investors, employees, and secondary market participants all need better ways to understand what a company is worth as conditions evolve. That is the problem Eqvista Real-Time Company Valuation® is designed to address.

The private market is no longer a small waiting room before the public markets. It has become a destination where companies can raise large amounts of capital, scale globally, and remain private for much longer than in previous generations. A simple comparison makes this clear: Tesla went public at roughly $2 billion, while SpaceX has remained private and reached around $1.2 trillion in value. That is an extraordinary difference, and it illustrates a larger trend: some of the most important value creation today is happening while companies are still private.

That change creates a major need for better infrastructure. If private companies can become hundreds of times larger before a liquidity event, then the systems used to price them cannot remain static, manual, or outdated. The market needs tools that support more continuous valuation, better decision-making, stronger governance, and more confidence across fundraising, employee equity, and strategic transactions.

This is where Eqvista is focused. We are building toward a future in which private market participants have access to more timely and more transparent pricing intelligence. Our view is that valuation should not be treated only as a compliance exercise. It should be part of the operating infrastructure of a modern private company. The better a company understands its price, the better it can make decisions about capital, ownership, growth, and long-term strategy.

The conversation at Montgomery Summit reinforced how timely this topic has become. As private markets grow in size and importance, pricing discovery will become one of the defining challenges – and opportunities – of the next decade. We believe the companies that help solve that challenge will play a foundational role in shaping the future of private capital markets.