How Can Individuals Invest in Pre-IPO Companies?

A decade ago the honest answer to this question was "mostly, you can't." The companies defining their industries stayed private, their shares sat with founders, employees, and venture funds, and nothing connected those holders to outside buyers. That has changed. Secondary markets cleared hundreds of billions of dollars in recent years, and an individual with the right eligibility now has three real routes in. They differ in almost every way that matters.

Route one: buy shares on a secondary marketplace

Brokerage marketplaces match existing shareholders, usually employees and early investors who want liquidity, with outside buyers. You pick a specific company, bid on a specific block, and after the company waives or exercises its right of first refusal, you own shares or an interest in a vehicle that holds them, often a single-company special purpose vehicle of the kind syndicates now organize around the most sought-after names.

The appeal is directness: you choose the name. The costs are everything that comes with that choice. Minimums typically run $10,000 to $100,000 per transaction. Platform fees and bid-ask spreads can be meaningful. Single-name SPVs layer their own economics on top: setup and administration fees, annual management fees, and often carried interest of 10 to 20 percent, and the hottest names sometimes pass through two stacked vehicles, each taking its cut. Transfers need company consent and can take weeks or fall through. Most of all, you carry the research burden alone: one company, one entry price, and no way to know whether you paid the most optimistic price in the market that day. Access generally requires meeting the SEC's accredited investor standard, broadly $1 million in net worth excluding your home, or $200,000 in annual income.

Route two: buy a fund that holds pre-IPO companies

The second route trades choice for diversification: a professional manager assembles a portfolio of private companies and you own the portfolio.

The structures differ in ways worth understanding. Interval funds and publicly listed vehicles offer low minimums and some liquidity, but rely on self-reported valuations to set prices, and closed-end listed vehicles can trade far above or below the value of what they hold. Private funds sit at the other end: higher minimums, a defined fund life instead of redemptions, and a manager underwriting every entry price. They are offered privately under SEC Regulation D, and many are limited to qualified purchasers, generally individuals with $5 million or more in investments. EQUIAM's Private Tech 30 Fund II, for example, targets a portfolio of roughly 30 late-stage private technology companies in a single vehicle, entered typically 12 to 36 months before expected liquidity.

The fund route answers the problem the marketplace route leaves open: in a market where a handful of companies produce most of the value, owning one name is a lottery ticket and owning the field is a strategy.

Route three: wait for the listing

Strictly, this is not pre-IPO investing at all, but it is the default most investors land on, so it belongs here. (Brokerage IPO allocations, which arrive hours before trading opens, are pre-IPO only in the narrowest sense.) It is also the weakest this option has ever been. Thirty-four U.S. technology companies listed publicly in 2025, against a median of about 120 a year through the 1990s. Companies now reach public-company scale years before any ticker exists, and the value created in those years goes to whoever owned the shares privately. Waiting is free, requires no eligibility, and forfeits exactly the growth phase this market is named for.

Two doors this page skips

The most common way individuals own pre-IPO stock is to earn it: employee equity is a compensation outcome, not an investment strategy, so it falls outside this guide. And equity crowdfunding platforms give non-accredited investors direct access to private companies, though almost always at the early stage, years and several funding rounds away from the pre-IPO leaders this market is named for.

What to check before any of it

Three questions separate informed buyers from hopeful ones. First, what share class are you buying? Headline valuations describe preferred stock wrapped in protections; secondary buyers often get common shares worth measurably less, a gap our valuation primer walks through. Second, what are the all-in costs: platform fees, spreads, carried interest, management fees, and on what base they are charged. Third, what is the realistic path to liquidity, because a cheap entry into a company with no exit route is not cheap.

Which route fits whom

An accredited investor with conviction about a single company and tolerance for single-name risk can use a marketplace. A qualified purchaser who wants the asset class rather than a bet on one name is usually better served by a fund, where entry pricing, diversification, and the share-class question are someone's full-time job. And an investor who qualifies for neither route today loses less than it seems by waiting: the discipline of knowing what you own transfers to every market.

EQUIAM invests in this market. This page describes access routes generally and is not an offer to sell securities; our funds are offered under SEC Rule 506(c) to qualified purchasers only.