Good day. The lack of initial public offerings has pushed startup employees, founders and investors to secondary markets, where they can sell their shares in still-private companies. Data provider PitchBook estimates that the value of the direct secondary market grew 83% from 2024 to 2025 to nearly $92 billion. 

But instead of creating a market that provides wide-ranging opportunities to buy and sell startup shares, secondary exchanges have largely become vehicles for exposure to the hottest pre-IPO names. On the secondary platform Hiive, for example, the top 20 most active startups accounted for 86.4% of secondary trading value in the fourth quarter of 2025, with the top five companies, names like SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, accounting for 55.6% of trading value.

A startup wants to fix this imbalance.

Software platform Earlyasset aims to unlock the secondary market for small and midsize venture-backed companies.

Based in Park City, Utah, the company has raised $2 million in a pre-seed round led by New Stack Ventures.

The company isn’t a secondary exchange, and it doesn’t broker deals. Instead, Earlyasset has built a pricing model to ease access to the secondary market for a subset of venture companies squeezed by a restrained exit environment, lagging distributions and extended timelines for going public.

“What we’re trying to do is fill the gap of the companies that used to have liquidity in the broader market, but no longer do,” said Shawn Bercuson, chief executive and co-founder of Earlyasset.

Bercuson and Earlyasset co-founder Alex Lurie are also managing partners of Earlyasset Capital, an entity that will provide liquidity to the Earlyasset platform.

Read the full article.

And now on to the news...

It’s a good time to be a startup employee. Startups have long been known for paying lower base salaries complemented by generous equity packages—ones that might or might not pay out. The idea was you incentivize people to stick around with the prospect of a big payday upon an exit or an IPO.  These days, high-growth artificial-intelligence startups are flush with venture capital. Combine that with a wildly competitive talent market and you get more cash-heavy offers, along with increasingly creative incentive structures.

Wearable devices company Whoop has raised $575 million in a new financing at a $10.1 billion valuation to expand the use of technology that has attracted celebrity users and U.S. regulatory scrutiny over its blood-pressure feature. Whoop’s wristband is paired with a smartphone app and can assess metrics like sleep quality and exercise recovery. Collaborative Fund, which first backed Whoop in 2013, led this Series G financing. This round also brought in several other investors, including LeBron James and Rory McIlroy, according to Whoop. The company is considering going public in the next two years.

As Anthropic and OpenAI compete for enterprise customers, the key constraint could be computing capacity—and OpenAI may be pulling ahead on that front, Truist analyst Arvind Ramnani writes in a note. Anthropic announced it would limit Claude usage for non-API users during peak weekday hours, which Ramnani says could signal that the lab is approaching capacity limits. OpenAI said it would reset usage limits for all Codex users. “We see this as a significant opportunity for OpenAI to take back agentic coding market share and believe Cursor could benefit as well,” Ramnani writes, adding that he believes OpenAI has a compute capacity advantage. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

—Elias Schisgall

Funds

Early-stage investor Corazon Capital held the final close of its fourth fund at $100 million. The firm also said it promoted Greg Johnston and Smriti Jayaraman to partner, and named Alison Stillman to partner.

People

Growth capital investor Highland Europe promoted Helena Richardson from principal to partner. She joined the firm in 2016.

Exits

Uber Technologies agreed to acquire chauffeur services provider Blacklane for an undisclosed amount.

Saronic Technologies, an Austin, Texas-based developer of maritime autonomous vessels, completed a $1.75 billion Series D round valuing the company at $9.25 billion. Kleiner Perkins led the funding, which included additional support from Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and others.

Starcloud, a Redmond, Wash.-based startup building data centers in space, snagged $170 million in Series A funding at a $1.1 billion valuation from investors including Benchmark and EQT Ventures. Chetan Puttagunta, general partner at Benchmark, will join the company’s board.

ScaleOps, a platform for autonomous cloud and AI infrastructure resource management, landed $130 million in Series C funding at a valuation of more than $800 million. Insight Partners led the investment, which saw participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others. The company is headquartered in New York and Israel.

OpenFX, a Miami-based cross-border payments platform and settlement network, scored $94 million in Series A funding from investors including M13, Accel, Atomico and Northzone.

Qodo, an AI code review and governance platform based in New York and Israel, raised $70 million in Series B funding. Qumra Capital led the round, which included participation from Square Peg, Susa Ventures, TLV Partners and others.

Sycamore, a Palo Alto, Calif.-headquartered startup building an operating system for autonomous enterprise AI, nabbed $65 million in seed funding from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital.

Sett, a startup building AI agents for the gaming industry, closed a $30 million Series B round. Greenfield Partners led the investment, which saw contributions from F2 Venture Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. The company has offices in New York and Israel.

Deccan AI, a Mountain View, Calif.-headquartered generative AI data startup, picked up a $25 million investment led by A91 Partners.

Kestra, a New York-based open source orchestration platform for data, AI and infrastructure workflows, snagged $25 million in Series A funding led by RTP Global.

Valinor Digital, a New York-headquartered blockchain-enabled credit platform, closed a $25 million seed round led by Castle Island Ventures.

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• Coatue projected $1.995 trillion valuation for Anthropic in 2030 (Newcomer)

This newsletter was compiled by Matthew Strozier, Yuliya Chernova and Zachary Cole. 

Share your tips, comments and questions: vcnews@wsj.com

The team: Matthew Strozier, Yuliya Chernova, and Brian Gormley.

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