Caplight's $16M Raise: A Bet on Data to Unlock Private Market Value

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – June 24, 2026 – In a move that signals a tectonic shift in how institutional capital interacts with private markets, data infrastructure firm Caplight Technologies has closed a $16 million Series A round. The funding, co-led by asset management giant BlackRock and fintech specialist Fin Capital, with strategic participation from UBS Investment Bank, is more than just a vote of confidence. It’s a calculated bet on the thesis that data is the key to unlocking the next era of private market investing, a domain that has ballooned in size while remaining stubbornly opaque.

The capital infusion will fuel Caplight’s expansion of its data platform and what it calls "agentic workflows" for research and transactions. The company, founded in 2021 by veterans of the pre-IPO marketplace Forge Global, is tackling a problem born of success: the venture capital asset class has tripled to over $12 trillion in just three years, far outpacing the development of the tools needed to navigate it. Caplight's mission is to bridge this critical infrastructure gap, and with backers like BlackRock, it now has the firepower and strategic alignment to industrialize the effort.

The Institutional Stamp of Approval

The involvement of BlackRock and UBS is the headline, but the strategic implications are the real story. This isn't simply capital; it's an endorsement from the heart of the global financial system, signaling an inflection point for private market transparency. For BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, the investment is a clear strategic play to deepen its capabilities in the rapidly growing alternative assets space.

"With private markets becoming a growing part of portfolios, investors are increasingly demanding better data, transparency, and efficient secondary market infrastructure," said Kunal Khara, Senior Managing Director and Global Head of Aladdin Product at BlackRock. "We believe Caplight is well positioned to serve these evolving client needs."

The key to this strategic calculus lies in the potential for collaboration. The investment establishes a framework for Caplight to work with BlackRock’s sprawling technology ecosystem, most notably the Aladdin platform and private markets data provider Preqin, which BlackRock owns. Integrating Caplight's proprietary secondary market data—real-time pricing intelligence from actual transactions—into Aladdin would provide thousands of institutional clients with an unprecedented view into the private markets. It transforms a black box into a dashboard, allowing portfolio managers to mark their private holdings to a market-based reality, not just a periodic, theoretical valuation. This synergy promises to supplement Preqin’s broad market intelligence with the granular, actionable data that traders and risk managers crave.

UBS’s participation underscores a parallel trend: the push to provide ultra-high-net-worth clients with more sophisticated access to pre-IPO opportunities. For a global wealth manager, offering differentiated access and intelligence on private companies is a significant competitive advantage. By backing Caplight, UBS is investing in the infrastructure needed to deliver these opportunities more safely and effectively.

Illuminating a $12 Trillion Shadow Market

For decades, the private market has operated on relationships, asymmetry of information, and long-held illiquidity. As companies stay private longer, the pressure for secondary liquidity and reliable valuations has intensified. This is the "infrastructure gap" that Caplight aims to fill. As CEO Javier Avalos stated, "Transparency unlocks private markets for institutional investors. We give the world's best investors the data they need to understand the venture market and the infrastructure to participate in it."

The scale of the data Caplight has aggregated is formidable. The platform claims to unify over 100,000 company and investor profiles, $4 trillion in funding round data, and, most critically, over $300 billion in proprietary secondary data, all while processing over $5 billion in daily live transaction flow. This trove of data powers its core services, providing a foundation for price discovery in a market where none has existed.

This positions the San Francisco-based firm in a competitive but fragmented landscape. While platforms like Forge Global and EquityZen have pioneered secondary marketplaces, and data providers like Pitchbook and Carta offer valuable insights, Caplight’s operational innovation is its synthesis of both. It is building not just a marketplace, but a market intelligence engine. Its founders, Javier Avalos and Justin Moore, bring direct experience from Forge, suggesting they have identified a more profound need beyond simple transaction facilitation. Their focus is on providing the sophisticated, real-time data layer that enables institutional-grade analysis, risk management, and ultimately, more complex financial instruments.

The Operational Engine: Data, Derivatives, and Agentic Workflows

The true innovation driving Caplight is its technology stack, designed to bring public market mechanics to the private sphere. At its core is "MarketPrice," a proprietary algorithm that generates near real-time price estimates for actively traded private companies. Instead of relying on stale 409A valuations or the last primary funding round, investors can track their portfolios based on what the secondary market is indicating right now. This shift from static to dynamic valuation is a fundamental change in how private assets can be managed.

Further differentiating its model is the ambition to enable derivative transactions. By providing reliable, continuous pricing data, Caplight is laying the groundwork for structured products like options and forwards on private company stock. This would be a revolutionary step, allowing investors to hedge their concentrated positions or make directional bets without having to transact the underlying shares—a level of financial sophistication that is standard in public equities but has been largely absent from venture capital.

The company's plan to expand its "agentic workflows" points to a future of increased automation and intelligence. While the term is broad, it suggests the development of AI-powered tools that can sift through Caplight's immense dataset to deliver personalized insights, flag trading opportunities, and streamline the entire transaction lifecycle from discovery to settlement. This focus on operational efficiency—reducing the friction and manual work that has long plagued private transactions—is essential for scaling the market. By offering its data and tools via API and direct server connections, Caplight is positioning itself not just as an application, but as a foundational utility for the entire private market ecosystem, ready to power the next generation of financial products and platforms.