Why late-stage secondary offerings are transforming private market access

SpaceX had the largest IPO in history, ending its first trading day on Nasdaq valued at roughly $2tn. However, most of the news coverage focused on the debut itself.

The more instructive story is everything that came before it. By the time public investors could buy their first share, more than two decades of value creation had already happened in private hands. The public market did not create that value, it arrived to price it.

We’ve been making this argument at Republic Europe for some time.

Private markets now account for nearly 9% of global equities, up from around 2% a decade ago. Companies are staying private for longer, raising more of their growth capital privately and treating a listing as the destination rather than the starting line.

For individual investors, this raises an uncomfortable question. If most of the growth is happening before the IPO, what does access look like for anyone who is not an institution?

That question is shaping our strategy, and is why we’re expanding the team’s focus to late-stage secondary offerings. Our current WHOOP campaign shows what this looks like in practice.

WHOOP sits at the intersection of AI, predictive health and elite human performance. Its subscription-only hardware model produces the kind of recurring revenue and brand loyalty that private market investors prize.

WHOOP’s reporting also points to operational discipline: cash-flow positive at the end of 2025, a $1.1bn annual revenue run rate, subscription bookings up 103% year-on-year and a $575m Series G closed in March 2026 at a $10.1bn valuation.

A company of this maturity would once have been accessible only to a handful of institutions. A structured secondary allocation changes that. 

Liquidity is the real unlock

For years, the standard playbook for private tech investing has carried a structural flaw: illiquidity.

Back a company early and your capital could sit trapped for a decade or more, waiting for an exit window that might never open.

The ambition for Republic Europe is to make trapped capital an outdated concept. By pairing structured, company-led campaigns with our 24/7 secondary platform, we’re building a continuous liquidity lifecycle.

Investors can look for liquidity well before a public exit. Later-stage participants can also access companies such as WHOOP, SpaceX and Kraken at prices agreed between willing buyers and sellers, rather than waiting on an IPO that may be years away.

That being said, liquidity in private markets is never guaranteed and no platform can promise a buyer.

What a functioning secondary market does is change the odds, and with them, market behaviour. People invest differently when they’re not locking the door behind themselves. 

What late-stage changes, and what it does not

Late-stage does not mean low risk, it means the risk changes shape. In early-stage investing the dominant question is execution: will a small team find product-market fit?

In late-stage secondaries, the business model is usually proven and the questions become quantitative: valuation, unit economics, cohort behaviour and the durability of growth.

By targeting late-stage companies like WHOOP and Kraken, not only do investors potentially have greater access to publicly available data, but also potential shorter estimated timelines to liquidity.

Join the Secondary Revolution

On 16 July we’re hosting an investor webinar on how secondary markets actually work, how company-led campaigns are structured and what participants should understand before taking part in global growth campaigns like WHOOP.

The democratisation of finance was never solely about helping early-stage startups raise their first round. The deeper unlock comes when individual investors can access companies at every stage of the private journey, on fair terms, with real information and with credible routes to liquidity.

That shift is now underway. Our job is to bring the infrastructure that makes it durable.