The startup enables investors to buy secondary shares in pre-IPO companies. Check out the 11-slide pitch deck Hiive used to raise $4.2 million.

• Hiive, a secondary shares marketplace startup, has raised $4.2 million in VC funding.
• The Vancouver-based company wants to bring buyers and sellers of secondaries into one place.
• The platform allows buyers to purchase stock from both individuals and institutions.

Hiive, a startup that provides a marketplace for secondary shares in private technology companies, has raised $4.2 million in venture capital.

The Vancouver-based company, founded in 2021, allows investors to buy and sell stakes in pre-IPO, venture-backed companies. Secondary shares have traditionally been highly illiquid, difficult to price due to a low volume of buyers and sellers, and subject to a variety of conditions.

Hiive, led by Sim Desai, formerly of secondaries broker Setter Capital, aims to provide a marketplace where a diverse range of buyers and sellers can conduct transactions.

“We saw this market growing exponentially after 2021 and thought there must be an opportunity to centralize this rapidly growing market,” Desai said in an interview with Insider. “Our vision has been to bring the order book into one place, we launched in May 2022 and we’ve been off to the races ever since.”

Following a crash in public market prices, valuations in the VC-backed startup industry have fallen significantly since the beginning of last year. However, reality has yet to hit some late-stage tech companies, with sellers and buyers still far apart on price for options, according to Desai.

Hiive’s platform allows buyers to buy stock from both individuals and institutions, with the option to group individual sellers from the same company into single transactions.

Uncorrelated Ventures led the $4.2 million funding round for Hiive, which also included Splash Capital, Harmony Venture Partners, Hack VC, and Agmen Capital. The seed funding values the company at $77 million after taxes.

“We launched this business on the back of, arguably, the biggest venture bull market in history so the funding was definitely not a cakewalk,” Desai said in a statement. “It was a long process, we started in early March and had conversations with lots of different types of investors before we found the right group.”

The new funds will be used to expand Hiive’s 50-person team. Desai stated that the company will aggressively hire, particularly in engineering and software development, in order to double its headcount in the next 12 months. Furthermore, the company intends to increase its marketing spend and consider offering a variety of fee breaks, or subsidies, to sellers in order to attract more transactions to its platform.