How Tomas Milar Plans to Control $1 Trillion in Private Equity

What we talked about.

Sunny Ray interviews Tomas Milar, founder of Eqvista, about his path from the Czech Republic to building a global equity management and valuation platform. Milar traces his entrepreneurial roots to watching his father run a high tech advertising business, his own first venture in 2006 exporting dehydrated nopal cactus products from Mexico, and years spent building registered agent and company secretary businesses in Hong Kong and Beijing. He explains how Eqvista evolved from equity administration into one of the largest 409A valuation providers, handling five to eight billion dollars in client asset valuations monthly, and how that data now powers a real time company valuation product meant to give shareholders a single reliable price instead of outdated PDFs. Milar contrasts Eqvista with Carta on cost and self serve simplicity, discusses acquiring the profitable Ink Paradise, starting a bank for startups, and building the whole business without ever raising venture capital. The conversation also touches on the Anthropic secondary market dispute and how AI is reshaping trust in media and information.

Eqvista founder Tomas Milar on building real time valuation tools to bring pricing clarity to private company stock.

The questions, and the answers.

Tell me about Eqvista and what you're building.

We started in Hong Kong building companies for people moving to Asia, then launched Startup Harbor and became one of the largest registered agents in the US. In 2017 I moved to the US, acquired a registered agent business in Nevada, and launched Eqvista for equity management. More recently we built a real time valuation platform and became one of the largest equity valuation providers on the market.

How is your system different from Carta?

We're a true software company, you don't need our team to use the platform, you can issue stock and build cap tables online without sales calls. We're about eighty percent cheaper, roughly five thousand dollars versus twenty five thousand. Our biggest focus now is real time company valuation, so shareholders see live stock prices instead of relying on outdated PDFs and inconsistent secondary market pricing.

How do you achieve real time pricing without a public order book?

We started as a 409A valuation provider and now do roughly five to eight billion dollars in client asset valuations monthly, one of the largest volumes on the market. That scale let us build precise algorithms, so we can value a company even without full data, though financials and cap tables make it more accurate. We're now building a marketplace to buy and sell stock.

What did your family teach you about money and work growing up in Czech Republic?

I was born in 1984 and barely remember communism since I was only five during the revolution. My father ran an advertising company focused on high tech printers and computers, and I watched him leave early and come home late building his business. Seeing that hard work as a kid, alongside playing hockey, really shaped who I became.

What pulled you into business so early, starting your first venture in 2006?

I had friends who were successful in their early twenties and felt stuck in school studying things that seemed impractical, like memorizing centuries old history. So I started an export import company between Europe and Mexico, dehydrating nopal cactus into products like supplements, bread, yogurt, and even a nopal beer. That company still operates and makes money today.

What did living in Beijing teach you that no business school could?

A progressive sixth grade teacher taught us to use an atlas instead of memorizing facts, and that stuck with me. Beijing in 2010 felt like a fairy tale, full of opportunity for foreigners with great jobs and salaries. I watched the old hutongs get torn down as the city rebuilt itself rapidly, which was an amazing thing to witness firsthand.

You built this without a single dollar of venture capital. Was that a principle, a constraint, or a strategy?

Honestly it's a mix of feelings whenever someone asks me that. I never had a passion to raise money, it just wasn't something that drove me as a founder.