Hiive

Building the Hiive platform required a special kind of engineering leader. Someone who was as much a product wonk as they were a technical leader. Someone who could be passionate about the vision to deliver a financial service in a better way, but who understood and appreciated that you could never fully take humans out of the equation. When we met Logan Leger in 2022, Hiive was a v1 marketplace with only a handful of engineers. We knew he fit the bill almost right away. He came recommended by our CPTO, Stuart Eccles, and we could tell that he understood and appreciated the primacy of customer experience on a platform as varied and complex as Hiive. To this day, Logan is so passionate about our mission that he still pushes commits on weekends, on top of managing a team of engineers that’s grown 1,400% to almost 50, in under 4 years (while also being a husband and father). Logan’s passion has paid off. What he and his team have built is the modern plumbing through which liquidity flows in the private market. A centralized platform designed for private companies and their shareholders to manage liquidity in a way that was previously manual, time-consuming, and error-prone. Robust systems that enable private companies to access capital, and investors to access opportunity, in an efficient, standardized, and compliant way, from end to end. Most of the infrastructure behind private market liquidity still feels stuck in another era. Logan and his team built a platform fit for the innovators that it serves.

Most founders discover their approach to private-market liquidity only after it's too late to be strategic about it. Today at 11:05AM, Sim Desai and Kyle Hanslovan of Huntress are on Center Stage at Web Summit Vancouver to discuss what the companies getting this right are doing differently. Susan Li of Fox Business is moderating. If you're at the conference, this is the one to catch.

My email has been blowing up this morning regarding recent media reports about bad actors around Anthropic share transfers and SPVs. Here’s our response. Companies are right to be concerned about fraud and unauthorized activity. We share those concerns. Hiive was built to bring greater transparency, standardization and institutional rigor to primary and secondary markets for late stage startup shares. The market has rewarded us tremendously for our efforts. We have facilitated transfers in the stock of over 400 companies. Hundreds of millions in transaction volume go through our pipes every single month. I have publicly advocated for higher standards and greater accountability as it relates to SPVs and late-stage private market transactions, including publishing concerns around problematic activity in this market, even before this week’s developments. I have also put my money where my mouth is, investing heavily in what I believe to be the most rigorous investment vetting and due diligence processes in the market. A few important facts:  • Hiive is a 200-person organization with an 11-person in-house legal and compliance team. • We work closely on liquidity programs with over 100 company management teams. Some use us 𝘦𝘹𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘺 to manage liquidity.  • Transactions facilitated through Hiive are subject to diligence, review, and vetting of the issuer of the securities, the shares themselves, the investment structure, and the fund manager (where one is involved).   • Our regulated secondary market infrastructure, operating within established compliance frameworks and shareholder agreements, is designed to detect anomalies and misrepresentations early.  • Because of our rigorous standards, approximately 70% of SPV listing requests reviewed by Hiive do not make it into the market.  • We do not facilitate share transfers without the company’s approval. We are succeeding in our mission to bring this market into the mainstream. We will continue to march ahead in our mission, no matter the slings and arrows that come our way. #liquidity

Many startups treat shareholder liquidity as an afterthought. It shouldn't be. Kyle Hanslovan built Huntress into a $1.5B+ cybersecurity company while treating liquidity as part of the operating model. He joins Hiive Founder & CEO Sim Desai on Center Stage at Web Summit Vancouver, May 13th at 11:05AM, moderated by Susan Li of Fox Business. The way private companies manage liquidity is changing. Be part of it.

Susan Woodard joined Hiive in December 2024 as Chief Compliance Officer. She came in with more than two decades of experience in private market compliance leadership, most recently as CCO at one of our industry peers and, previously, at one of the world's largest asset managers. Every time we launch a fund, Susan and her team are at the table asking the questions. Have we diligenced the target assets? What is the quality of the manager? What claims are we making, and can they be defended? Susan built the team and framework that ensure those questions are answered. The Hiive Standard exists because of her. Every win has to be defensible. That isn't a constraint on Hiive's growth; it's the foundation of it. And it's the bar this industry needs.

Looking forward to discussing scale-up strategies with BC Tech today, and sharing lessons from Hiive's growth on the decisions, tradeoffs, and operating realities that shape long-term success.

Everyone is talking about SpaceX's IPO. Nobody is talking about the resulting unwinding of billions in single-asset private fund exposure behind it. After an IPO, SPVs and their GPs are subject to post-IPO lockups like other shareholders. But in the case of fund investments, the GP usually has real discretion over the timing and nature of distributions. Will investors receive stock or cash, and when? If the stock is volatile after listing and the manager holds it against investors’ wishes, or an investor unexpectedly receives cash instead of stock, investors lose agency (and opportunities) they thought they’d have. But there may be even bigger surprises in store for those who invested with lower-quality SPVs and managers. As Erin Griffith and Ryan Mac reported for The New York Times, “investors do not have access to much information about a private company’s financials or the provenance of the shares they are buying.” Some may discover they don't actually have direct exposure to what they thought they owned, whether due to hidden economics (fees) or outright misrepresentation of the fund's holdings or structure. These risks are exacerbated by multi-layer structures in which the GP they invested with does not have control over, or even transparency into, the actions of the fund that ultimately holds the stock directly. There may even be some cases where the transfer of a first-layer fund into a second-layer fund was not legitimate. We ourselves had a case where we became aware of anomalies with a first-layer manager, and once we understood the issue, we made the difficult (but prompt) decision to force the manager to redeem our funds (cash us out). We then distributed the cash to our investors. They were not pleased, but I think they recognized that it was the right call. Investors don’t need to wait for the lessons to be learned from a potential SpaceX IPO to start planning wisely for their next investment. Here are some best practices to consider: 1. Invest with a manager who can provide AUDITED financial statements. 2. Ensure you understand their due diligence process on both the underlying holdings and the underlying manager (in the case of a dual-layer fund). 3. Ask them about their regulatory status. Are they an ERA/RIA? Associated with a FINRA member? Neither? Do they have an in-house legal and compliance team? How big is that team, and who are the members specifically? Get their names. 4. Get them to make legal representations in writing about all fees at all layers that could ultimately impact your investment, so you can hold them accountable later. When it comes to SPVs, it’s the driver, not the vehicle. If SPVs are here to stay, we will need to establish rigorous quality and investor protection standards around them. SpaceX will be a very public test case for who has been operating with foresight and integrity, and who hasn't. Investors awaiting an IPO should be asking these questions up front, not after the bell rings.

Cerebras is reported to be going public. It would be the first pure-play AI chip maker and competitor to NVIDIA, to be available for public trading. The party is about to begin in the public market, but it started long ago in the private market. As you can see from the chart, we closed our first trade on Hiive on May 2, 2023, almost exactly 3 years ago. The price per share was $12.50 with an implied valuation of around $3 billion. Seemed like a lot at the time. But the world had recently woken up to the power of AI and this stock’s journey was only beginning. Three years and many hundreds of trades later, the company most recently raised a financing round, reportedly valuing it at around 23 billion and $89 per share. In recent days, the Hiive Price has risen as high as an eye-watering $164/sh. It will be interesting to see how the IPO prices relative to these levels. Will the private market act as a price discovery tool for the public listing? Will Cerebras' rise continue? #liquidity

I would argue that the fundamental difference between a traditional brokerage on the one hand, and a marketplace on the other, is compounding network effects. In fact, I believe that it’s when you start to see 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 growth in a marketplace that you have a credible claim to network effects. That magical feeling that the marketplace is starting to drive 𝘪𝘵𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 forward. We founded Hiive in the pursuit of that feeling. The feeling of true network effects in the institutional market for investments in late-stage venture-backed companies. We expected it to be a treacherous road with a high probability of failure, but the potential prize was too great to pass up. And it 𝘩𝘢𝘴 been arduous. We have shed much blood, sweat, and tears, turning a traditional financial services business into a fully integrated technology platform. It’s a staggeringly complex business with countless threats and risks. But with our relentlessness, we are battling through. It took 2 years to get from 0 to 100 matches per week on our platform. But in the last 2 years we've gone from 100 to 1000. And 5 years into our journey, though we are only just getting started, I am beginning to get that magical feeling.