Before the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s private firms enjoyed the largest capital flows with initial public offering (IPO).
[1] By 2019, this was confirmed by a significant jump in the number of “unicorns”, privately held startup companies valued at over $1 billion.
At the same time, it is difficult to objectively estimate the value of shares at the pre-IPO stage because a privately held company, unlike a public one, doesn't disclose financial statements.
Additionally, there is far less liquidity and higher transaction costs for selling private shares, particularly among companies that are smaller or seen as less desirable.
In autumn 2020, JPMorgan announced that the investment bank was launching a new team focused on trading pre-IPO stocks exclusively[5] Manhattan Venture Partners has built their firm by focusing on a handful of high conviction “firm mandated transactions” instead of crossing orders across a large number of companies.