Hiive

Hiive is one of the newer entrants among private-share marketplaces, built specifically to serve smaller and earlier-stage secondary trades that the minimum thresholds at larger platforms like Forge and EquityZen tend to exclude.

The platform runs a more open, listing-driven model where shareholders post positions and prospective buyers make offers directly, with fees typically in the 2-3% range and settlement timelines broadly comparable to its larger peers.

Hiive's emergence alongside Forge's acquisition by Schwab illustrates a bifurcating marketplace landscape: established platforms consolidating into larger financial institutions, while newer entrants target the smaller-check, earlier-stage segment those larger players have less appetite for.

Hiive runs a listing-based marketplace where holders post positions and buyers bid, with the emphasis on visible pricing rather than an intermediary quoting a spread. Its stated focus includes smaller and less-covered companies, a segment where price discovery is hardest because few comparable transactions exist.

Employees, angels and early-stage investors sit on the sell side, and the practical value of a transparent order book is information: seeing where bids sit for a company with no recent round is often more useful than the transaction itself. Transfer restrictions still apply, and the company can still refuse.

Technology-driven marketplaces that match buyers and sellers of private shares and standardize the paperwork. They intermediate transactions; they are not themselves buyers of the positions they list.

This site groups buyers into four categories, because the category tells you more about how a firm behaves than its size does. See the rest of themarketplace & platformgroup in the directory.