Funds & buyers · Platform within a diversified manager
Industry Ventures
Industry Ventures was founded in San Francisco in 2000 with a singular focus that set it apart from most of this list: venture capital secondaries specifically, rather than buyout or diversified private equity. It built a platform investing across the VC lifecycle — buying LP stakes in venture funds, direct secondary positions in venture-backed companies, and primary commitments to emerging managers.
Goldman Sachs announced an agreement to acquire Industry Ventures in 2025, in a deal worth roughly $665 million in cash and equity plus up to $300 million in performance-based consideration through 2030; the acquisition became effective January 2, 2026. At the time, Industry Ventures managed about $7 billion in assets and had made more than 1,000 secondary and primary investments since founding.
Industry Ventures now sits inside Goldman Sachs' External Investing Group, giving Goldman a dedicated venture-secondaries capability that complements Vintage Strategies' longer-running, more buyout-oriented secondaries platform within the same division.
Worth knowing
The rare secondaries specialist built entirely around venture capital rather than buyout or diversified private equity.
What a transaction here looks like
Industry Ventures concentrates on venture capital secondaries — LP stakes in venture funds and direct positions in venture-backed companies. That is a materially different discipline from buyout secondaries: venture portfolios are more concentrated in outcomes, valuations are more sensitive to the last round's terms, and a fund's reported value can be dominated by one or two positions.
Who sits on the other side
Sellers include venture fund investors seeking liquidity in a slow exit environment, and shareholders in individual companies that have stayed private far longer than the fund structure anticipated. This is the corner of the institutional market closest to what employees and angels experience, and the pricing conventions here reward understanding of specific companies rather than portfolio statistics.
Where this sits in the market
Secondaries desks and franchises that operate inside a larger private-markets manager, usually built by acquiring an independent specialist and folding it into a broader platform.
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 theplatform within a diversified managergroup in the directory.
Frequently asked
Why are venture secondaries harder to price than buyout secondaries?
Because returns are concentrated: a venture fund's value often rests on a small number of positions, and the marks on those positions derive from the last financing round rather than from cash flows. Small changes in assumptions about one company move the whole valuation.
Who owns Industry Ventures?
It is part of the Goldman Sachs alternatives platform following its acquisition. As with several firms in this directory, the venture secondaries team and its strategy predate the acquisition — always check the current ownership rather than assuming.
See the full buyer directory, or read the glossaryfor the terms (LP-led, GP-led, continuation fund) that describe how firms like this actually transact.