Nasdaq Private Market Secures $37.6M in Series C Funding

January 16, 2026 landed like a quiet flex from two coasts that know how power actually moves. Nasdaq Private Market, headquartered between New York and San Francisco, closed a $37.6M Series C that did not shout for attention. It did something better. It let the numbers speak while the structure tightened. This platform started life inside Nasdaq in 2013, carrying the DNA of SecondMarket, founded in 2004 by Barry Silbert, and it has spent more than a decade learning where private capital really gets stuck and who pays the price for that friction.

Cerity Partners led the round, bringing more than $140B in assets under management and a very specific message about where private liquidity is heading. This was Cerity Partners’ first move into private market infrastructure, paired with an exclusive partnership that folds financial planning, tax guidance, and wealth management directly into Nasdaq Private Market liquidity programs. Kurt Miscinski did not show up for optics. Cerity Partners showed up to wire wealth outcomes into the moment employees finally get paid for the risk they carried.

Optiver joined as a new investor, because electronic trading firms do not waste time on theory. Liam Smith took a board seat alongside Michael Barry from Cerity Partners, reinforcing that this market is now being shaped by people who understand flow, structure, and incentives, not just brand names. Existing backers including Nasdaq, DRW Venture Capital, and HiJoJo Partners doubled down, pushing the valuation to more than four times the Series B from February 2024. That is not momentum. That is conviction.

Tom Callahan has been steady at the center of this build, steering Nasdaq Private Market through independence and scale with the calm of someone who understands market plumbing is more important than market noise. René Paula joined in May 2025 as CLO and CFO, bringing deal discipline earned at scale. Samantha Tortora arrived the same day to shape growth with the math brain of BlackRock and the storytelling instinct private markets rarely reward but desperately need. Andrew Kroculick has been there since 2017, translating vision into settlement reality while most people are still arguing about definitions.

The traction backs it up. Nearly $15B in transaction volume in 2025. Roughly $70B since inception. More than 875 company-sponsored liquidity programs serving over 200,000 participants. Liquidity for more than 180 unicorns in a world where only about 25 of the 1,200 global unicorns have active secondary markets. That gap is not a problem. It is the opportunity.

SecondMarket and Tape D are not product names chasing nostalgia. They are tools built to bring price discovery, execution, and data into a part of the economy that has lived too long on spreadsheets and hope. With Series C capital now aimed at automation, artificial intelligence, and global participation, the private markets are starting to sound less like a backroom and more like a venue where accountability finally shows up, and that shift tends to attract attention from exactly the right people.