Morgan Stanley to buy EquityZen, boosting pre-IPO trading access.

Morgan Stanley has moved to acquire EquityZen, a specialist marketplace for trading stakes in private companies, in a strategic push to deepen its private-markets capabilities within wealth management. The purchase gives the bank direct control over a distribution channel that connects sellers of pre-IPO holdings with a broad buyer base, creating new streams of trading revenue and proprietary valuation data.

The deal is designed to convert growing client demand for earlier exposure to high-growth private companies into a structured service offering. EquityZen — founded in 2013 — counts about 800,000 registered users and has facilitated roughly 49,000 transactions involving more than 450 private companies. For an institution that serves millions of retail and wealth clients, owning a secondary-market venue provides both fee income and insight into private-market pricing dynamics.

Industry executives say the acquisition follows a broader trend: major banks and asset managers are integrating private-market infrastructure to offer differentiated access and to capture the segment’s fee pools. Michael Gaviser, Head of Private Markets at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, framed the move as a direct response to client demand for curated pre-IPO exposure across a wider investor base.

Beyond immediate distribution gains, the transaction gives Morgan Stanley a data advantage. Trade-level information from a platform like EquityZen helps refine internal valuation models, improves NAV transparency for private holdings and can inform product design across managed accounts and advisory solutions. Banks that control liquidity venues can also compress execution times and reduce counterparty friction for wealthy clients seeking to monetise private stakes.

The acquisition complements Morgan Stanley’s existing private-markets initiatives — including its 2023 collaboration with Carta — and places the firm among a small group of financial institutions expanding in the pre-IPO and secondary marketplaces. Comparable moves by peers in recent years have focused on licensing or partnering with secondary platforms; outright ownership signals a more vertical strategy aimed at integrating front-end distribution with backend data and custody capabilities.

EquityZen’s founder and CEO, Atish Davda, said the combination will unlock new pathways for investors and portfolio holders to transact shares more efficiently. For Morgan Stanley, the acquisition is both a commercial play — to capture execution fees and advisory flows — and a strategic investment in the data that will underpin next-generation private-market products.