Secondaries are an elephant-sized black box.
The market is mammoth, expanding, and—here’s the kicker—we have no clue how big it really is. The secondaries market has exploded in recent years, driven by a simple problem: companies are staying private longer, exits have dried up, and investors need inventive ways to return cash to their LPs.
New PitchBook data estimates that, in 2025, somewhere between $62.5 billion and $120.9 billion were traded in U.S. direct secondaries. Now, $58 billion-plus is a helluva range, but more importantly: that’s a margin of error larger than many markets. (The worldwide total addressable market for, say, soap is around $50 billion.) One point of comparison: $50 billion was the volume for all of 2024.
And this is where the market grows lopsided, as everyone chases a handful of companies. PitchBook points out that the top 20 startups on private stock marketplace Hiive accounted for an astonishing 86.4% of secondary trading value in the fourth quarter of 2025. The top five (names like OpenAI and SpaceX) accounted for 55.6% of that volume.
So, how big is the secondary market? What can we actually know right now? PitchBook goes straight to the midpoint of that range, $91.7 billion, then adds their estimate for GP-led venture secondaries volume, $14.6 billion. That gets the 2025 market for U.S. venture secondaries to $106.3 billion.
And that’s almost definitely conservative. We’ve lost track of an elephant.
See you tomorrow,
