Unlocking the Private Markets: Why Data is the New Currency of Investing

The private markets have transitioned from a niche alternative asset class to a cornerstone of modern portfolio strategy. Globally, the private markets have surged to staggering heights, now valued at over $13 trillion in Assets Under Management (AUM). Yet, as the asset class scales and companies opt to remain private for longer than ever before, the ultimate barrier to entry is no longer capital, it's information.

As interest in private markets grows, data has become a key factor in broadening access, transforming an opaque ecosystem into a transparent, actionable landscape for a wider array of investors; not just the largest institutions.

The Information Advantage

In the public markets, standardized pricing, real-time data feeds, and audited financial reporting are taken for granted. In the private markets, data has historically been fragmented and heavily guarded. Today, however, specialized platforms are working to lift the veil, providing access to several crucial types of information:

• Financial Fundamentals + Funding History: Information on a company's business model, leadership, key competitors, institutional investors, and historical funding rounds. This information allows investors to benchmark a company's growth against peers and assess its long-term market potential.
• Capitalization Tables: Cap tables provide a breakdown of equity ownership, detailing how capital flows through a company upon a sale or IPO. Investors need this to understand liquidity preferences, share class differences, and the impact of dilution on existing and future investors.
• Market + Transaction Data: Real-world metrics like bid/ask volume, valuations, and recent transaction data. This provides a gauge of market sentiment and liquidity, allowing investors to inform their investment decisions with actual trading data rather than theoretical estimates or stale primary rounds.

Beyond Equity: The Data Boom in Private Credit and Alternative Assets

The demand for transparency extends far beyond venture capital and private equity. Across the broader alternative investment landscape—from infrastructure and real estate to the booming world of private debt—data access is becoming critical.

Private credit, for example, has evolved from a post-2008 niche to a nearly $2 trillion global market. As companies increasingly bypass traditional bank lending for private financing, this asset class has reached systemic scale. However, evaluating the risk of a privately issued loan is vastly different from evaluating a public bond. Without public filings or standardized pricing, investors require deep visibility into borrower performance, default rates, and loan-level covenants.

Whether it is assessing the yield of a private credit facility or the secondary market value of a late-stage tech unicorn, the overarching theme is the same: as these asset classes mature, the information gap must close. Robust data platforms are no longer optional; they are the required plumbing that allows both institutional and individual investors to benchmark performance, monitor portfolios, and deploy capital in an informed manner.

Industry Giants Are Taking Notice: A Multi-Billion Dollar Land Grab

The staggering value of and demand for private market intelligence is driving a wave of high-profile acquisitions by traditional financial titans. Over the past two years alone, major institutions have spent billions to acquire access to private market insights across asset classes, signaling a massive industry consolidation and clear strategic imperative.

While foundational moves like Morningstar's acquisition of PitchBook set the stage years ago, the arms race has recently reached new heights:

• BlackRock Acquires Preqin ($3.2B): In 2024, BlackRock acquired Preqin, a strategic move to integrate comprehensive private market data directly into its Aladdin investment technology platform, bridging the gap between public and private portfolio management.
• S&P Global Acquires With Intelligence ($1.8B): In late 2025, S&P Global purchased With Intelligence from Motive Partners. This vastly expanded S&P Global's data coverage to approximately 30,000 investors across private equity, private credit, and hedge funds, cementing its leadership in private market intelligence.
• MSCI Acquires PM Insights: Most recently, the push for transparency continued with MSCI’s April 2026 acquisition of PM Insights, a firm providing daily secondary market reference data for private companies representing over $5.5 trillion in market value.

These multi-billion dollar moves validate a simple truth: access to private market data is a mandatory table stake for smart investing. Meanwhile, independent private market data providers like CBInsights, Crunchbase and Sacra Research continue to grow, addressing the growing demand for access to private market data.

The EquityZen Edge: Transparency Backed by Transactions

While major financial data providers are actively buying their way into the space to aggregate valuations and benchmark data, EquityZen has spent over a decade building its intelligence from the ground up. In the private secondary market, the most valuable data doesn't always come from scraping public filings or building theoretical models; it comes from actual trades in Unicorn companies.

Backed by 13 years of historical data and over 52,000 completed transactions¹, EquityZen provides the deep, actionable insights investors need to explore the private markets and conduct thorough due diligence. This is why Yahoo Finance chose to partner with EquityZen to broaden access to private company data via its own Private Markets Hub.

The key information we make available to investors and shareholders on our platform includes:

• The Private Market Landscape: Through tools like our Private Market Map and detailed Company Pages, investors can access detailed overviews of trending companies, explore interactive valuation trends, and compare industry peers².
• Cap Table Clarity: We pull back the curtain on equity structures by providing cap tables for most deals offered via our funds, offering visibility into ownership, valuation estimates, and liquidity preferences³.
• Real Market Activity: Because we are an active marketplace, our data reflects true market sentiment. Investors can view bid and ask volume, reference prices, and recent transaction details. We synthesize this into a proprietary "Market Score", combining transactability, liquidity, and demand data generated by our community of over 800,000 members⁴.

While other platforms may aggregate primary rounds or pricing estimates, EquityZen relies on a bedrock of executed, company approved trades to power its transparent research tools. This means our investors don't have to guess what a private share is worth; they can lean on over a decade of real secondary market data to help them make informed investment decisions.

Looking Ahead

As private markets continue to expand across equity, credit, and real assets, the need for actionable data will only grow. Quality data is the essential bridge connecting a broader set of investors to the alternative assets defining the economy of tomorrow. At EquityZen, we are proud to power that bridge with robust, transaction-backed insights on the private market.