Pre-IPO Liquidity Markets: How C.CAPITAL Accesses US Tech Leaders Before They Go Public

AI companies captured 67% of all private markets funding in 2025, up from just 9% in 2022 — despite representing only 20% of companies raising capital. Total AI funding rose from $8.2 billion in 2022 to $94.6 billion in 2025. This capital concentration creates a new category of opportunity: secondary access to late-stage positions ahead of an IPO.

Pre-IPO liquidity platforms like Forge Global have structured themselves precisely to meet this demand. Forge tracks a daily indicative price index across roughly 200 pre-IPO companies, and facilitates the sale of shares held by employees and early investors. It's a market mechanism that didn't exist at this scale a decade ago — and it's transforming how an institutional investor can access late-stage AI without going through a primary funding round.

What the 2025-2026 IPO cycle validates about this thesis

Recent exits confirm the strength of the pipeline. CoreWeave, a cloud provider specializing in renting Nvidia GPU clusters, went public in March 2025. Cerebras Systems began trading on Nasdaq in May 2026, raising approximately $3.5 billion at a valuation near $48.8 billion. SpaceX completed one of the most anticipated IPOs in history in June 2026, raising $75 billion to fund its AI and space datacenter ambitions.

Each of these exits validates the same thesis: positions accumulated pre-IPO in these companies, via secondary markets, capture a meaningful share of the value creation that later materializes at listing. It's this window — between the last private round and the IPO — that the pre-IPO secondary market now allows investors to capture with liquidity that didn't previously exist.

The C.CAPITAL approach to US late-stage positions

C.CAPITAL accesses late-stage secondary positions in leading US AI and cloud infrastructure companies via these pre-IPO liquidity markets. This approach complements the discounted AI infrastructure secondaries thesis: where one targets the structural discount on infrastructure assets that are hard to value, the other targets access to growth positions already well understood by the market, but historically closed to investors outside primary venture capital.

The discipline stays the same on both fronts: maximum conviction, a deliberately sub-5% conversion rate, an average ticket of €2-10 million. Market access doesn't replace selectivity — it broadens it.

A still-young asset class, already validated by the market

The success of exits like SpaceX, Cerebras and CoreWeave doesn't guarantee the performance of the next ones — but it confirms the market mechanism works: pre-IPO liquidity captures a real share of US tech leaders' value creation ahead of listing. It's this mechanism, combined with C.CAPITAL's sector discipline, that structures FINXIA Capital's access to this asset class.