Hiive, a startup that offers a marketplace for secondary shares in private tech companies, has raised $4.2 million in funding.
Hiive, led by Sim Desai, formerly of secondaries broker Setter Capital, wants to provide a marketplace where an array of buyers and sellers can make trades.
“We saw this market growing exponentially after 2021 and thought there must be an opportunity to centralize this rapidly growing market,” Desai told Insider. “Our vision has been to bring the order book into one place, we launched in May 2022 and we’ve been off to the races ever since.”
Valuations across the VC-backed startup industry have declined significantly since the start of last year following a crash in public market prices. However, for some late-stage tech companies, it’s taken a while for reality to hit with sellers and buyers still far apart on price for options, Desai said.
Hiive’s platform allows buyers to purchase stock from both individuals and institutions, with the option for buyers to bundle groups of individual sellers from a given company into single transactions.
Hiive’s $4.2 million funding was led by Uncorrelated Ventures, alongside Splash Capital, Harmony Venture Partners, Hack VC, and Agmen Capital. The seed funding values the business at $77 million post-money.
“We launched this business on the back of, arguably, the biggest venture bull market in history so the funding was definitely not a cakewalk,” Desai added. “It was a long process, we started in early March and had conversations with lots of different types of investors before we found the right group.”
The fresh capital will go towards growing Hiive’s 50-strong team. Desai said the business will aggressively hire particularly in areas like engineering and software development as it looks to double its headcount in the next 12 months. In addition, the company wants to grow its marketing spend and look to provide a variety of fee breaks, or subsidies, to sellers to help bring more transactions to its platform.
You can check out Hiive’s 11-slide pitch deck below:
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