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Caplight is building the private-market data terminal: $300B in secondary transaction data, $52T in customer AUM, and BlackRock leading the A.
ENTRY ANGLES
Build early-stage secondary pricing data for the pre-seed/seed market ($2M–$20M valuations) · Create cap table infrastructure with secondary data integration for angel investors and micro-VCs
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Financial data collection, Network building with institutional investors, Data aggregation infrastructure
Venture capital tripled into a $12 trillion asset class in under three years. The data infrastructure built to analyze it is still running on spreadsheets, phone calls, and whatever the last fund admin remembers about comparable pricing.
Public markets have exchange data, standardized feeds, and decades of pricing history. Private markets have none of it – especially in the secondary market, where investors trade existing shares in companies that may not go public for years. Pricing those transactions requires comparable data that mostly does not exist in any structured form.
Caplight built the private market equivalent of a data terminal: 100,000 company and investor profiles, $4 trillion in funding round data, and more than $300 billion in proprietary secondary market transaction data – accumulated from deals it has facilitated directly. Daily live transaction flow exceeds $5 billion. The platform serves customers managing over $52 trillion in assets, accessible via dashboard, API, and an MCP server that makes the data directly callable by AI agents running in any investment workflow.
BlackRock and Fin Capital led a $16 million Series A announced June 24, 2026, with strategic participation from UBS Investment Bank and co-lead from LEAP Global Partners. Javier Avalos and Justin Moore founded the company in San Francisco in 2021.
The secondary market is where the data story gets interesting. Secondary transactions – investors buying existing shares in private companies rather than participating in primary rounds – have grown substantially as companies stay private longer. A company that raised its Series A in 2019 and has not gone public is now in year seven of private operation. Early investors want liquidity. Other investors want exposure without waiting for a public market event that may not come for years.
Caplight’s $300 billion in proprietary secondary data is the non-obvious asset. Funding round data is approximately public – press releases, SEC filings, Crunchbase. Secondary transaction pricing is private by nature: it exists because Caplight runs the transactions. More transaction volume generates more pricing data; better pricing data makes the platform more valuable for the next transaction; more accurate pricing attracts more institutional participants. The flywheel compounds.
The BlackRock investment is itself a signal. BlackRock does not typically lead Series A rounds in early-stage fintech – their infrastructure investments tend to come later, when unit economics are proven. Showing up at the A suggests either a strategic data relationship or a view that private markets data will be structurally important to their own operations faster than the standard VC timeline implies.
The MCP server detail is worth pausing on. Most financial data platforms are built to serve humans through dashboards. An MCP server means Caplight’s data is designed to serve AI agents directly – a fund’s research workflow can query Caplight programmatically rather than routing an analyst through a UI. That is not a feature addition; it is a bet that investment research in the next cycle runs primarily on agents, and that being the data source those agents call first is a structural position.
The data gap Caplight has not addressed is the sub-$100M valuation tier. Caplight focuses on venture-backed companies with enough transaction history to make pricing meaningful. The pre-seed and early-seed market – companies valued at $2M–$20M – is entirely uncharted from a secondary data perspective. The per-transaction value is lower, but the volume is orders of magnitude larger, and the information asymmetry is more extreme. A data product focused on early-stage secondary pricing, potentially combined with cap table infrastructure, could establish network effects before anyone else builds the data asset.
The constraint is time. Financial data businesses require institutional trust, and trust compounds slowly. The shortcut is the one Caplight used: partner with institutions that already have it. BlackRock on the cap table is a trust endorsement that no amount of marketing can replicate at the Series A stage.