Analysis
Phil Haslett of EquityZen laid out a stark bifurcation now defining private-market secondary pricing, Crunchbase News reported: the average secondary transaction across EquityZen's marketplace trades at a 38% discount to a company's last priced funding round, but that average masks two very different cohorts moving in opposite directions.
AI-native startups founded in 2023 or later -- built around AI from inception rather than retrofitting it into an existing product -- are trading at premiums in the secondary market, as investors anticipate rapid revenue acceleration and successive up-rounds. Legacy SaaS companies that raised during 2021's peak-valuation "go-go years," by contrast, are absorbing the market's steepest discounts as growth has slowed and business models have had to adapt to post-hype realities. Haslett's clearest example: Airtable, which raised at a valuation north of $10 billion during the 2021 boom, later sold for substantially less.
- AI-native cohort (2023+) -- trading at premiums on EquityZen's platform, priced for anticipated rapid valuation growth
- 2021 SaaS cohort -- absorbing the steepest discounts, exemplified by Airtable's markdown from its $10B-plus peak
- EquityZen -- acquired by Morgan Stanley, deal completed January 2026
- Forge Global -- comparable secondary-market platform, sold to Charles Schwab around the same period
“Haslett's clearest example: Airtable, which raised at a valuation north of $10 billion during the 2021 boom, later sold for substantially less.”
Haslett's framing pushes back against a simple "legacy SaaS is doomed" narrative, though. His view is that execution, not just founding vintage, determines which older software companies recover: "Companies that can combine the stickiness and customer loyalty... with domain expertise and AI are going to do just fine." A 2021-vintage SaaS company with genuine customer retention and a credible AI integration roadmap can still close some of the discount gap with newer AI-native peers, in his telling -- the discount reflects market skepticism about growth trajectory more than a permanent verdict on the underlying business.
The secondary-market infrastructure itself is consolidating around this bifurcation: Morgan Stanley completed its acquisition of EquityZen in January 2026, and Forge Global's sale to Charles Schwab happened on a similar timeline -- both signals that large financial institutions see growing, durable demand for private-market liquidity tools as more companies stay private longer and need a market for early employee and investor liquidity outside of a traditional IPO.
For LPs and secondary buyers, the practical takeaway is that a flat 38% average discount number is close to useless for pricing an individual position -- the real question for any specific company is which side of the AI-native versus legacy-SaaS divide it falls on, and whether it has a credible, funded plan to close that gap through actual AI-driven product integration rather than marketing language alone.
