Sunny Ray sits down with Roman, co-founder of PM Insights, to explore how the company brought transparency to the opaque world of private market pricing. Roman explains how he and CEO Nick started the company in 2021 during the private markets boom, building a secondary market pricing feed by aggregating anonymized data from a consortium of nearly 50 brokers. This data allowed PM Insights to predict down rounds before they happened, as illiquid pre-IPO companies like SpaceX, Stripe, and Anthropic saw secondary prices diverge sharply from last-round valuations. The conversation covers the company's 2024 rebrand from Apeview to PM Insights, its data partnership with NASDAQ Private Market, and a collaboration with Syntax Data to build similarity scores addressing a three trillion dollar private market data gap. Roman also discusses achieving SOC 2 compliance to satisfy institutional clients and closes with advice for fintech founders on staying focused on a core customer segment. Throughout, Roman details how hedge funds, family offices, asset managers, and alternative lenders use PM Insights to price and evaluate private holdings.
PM Insights co-founder Roman explains how secondary market data brought pricing transparency to opaque private tech company valuations.
Can you share what PM Insights does and what it means going from opaque to open in private markets?
We started PM Insights with Nick, my co-founder and CEO, in 2021 during the private markets boom. People struggled to price equity in late stage VC backed companies, and many funds just held valuations at last round. We worked with a consortium of brokers gathering secondary market data and showed prices were often below last round, which predicted down rounds at companies like Clara in 2022 and 2023.
How do brokers fit into your data model?
We work with close to 50 brokers active in this space on a give and get basis. They share anonymized data with us, so we don't know who they're dealing with, but we know the bids, offers, or trades happening in companies like SpaceX or Stripe. In exchange, they get access to our service without paying as long as they keep contributing data.
Can you explain how you actually determine pricing and valuation from that data?
We take order book data from many brokers, including bids, offers, and completed trades, and run an algorithm that merges it into a pricing feed approximating a mid market price per share. If we have an accurate share count, we turn that into a valuation. We add context from funding rounds, share classes, investor terms, and fund marks from firms like Fidelity or BlackRock.
Why did you rebrand from Apeview to PM Insights in September 2024?
Our original name confused people. Nick came up with Apeview as a play on private equity view, and a group of apes is called a shrewdness, so shrewd investors wanting private market data. But it was too complicated for people to figure out, and we kept getting confused with NFT companies, since NFTs were still a hot topic back then.
You partnered with NASDAQ Private Market. Can you tell us about that?
That wasn't recent, that was back in 2024. We had a partnership where we supplied them with our pricing data, which they used to help inform people participating in tender offers at the companies they were facilitating those offers for. We worked with them for about a year and a half.
Tell us about the Syntax Data partnership tackling the three trillion dollar private market data gap.
Once you have pricing data for certain companies, you want to understand others without secondary activity by benchmarking them against similar active companies. Syntax had built strong similarity scores for public markets based on revenue streams, customer types, industry, and geography. We partnered with them to create similar comparability scores for private companies, and between private and public companies, which has been very useful for valuation work.
You achieved SOC 2 compliance. What signal are you trying to send to institutional clients?
This came up repeatedly in conversations with clients focused on audits and large institutions, so we decided to go through the compliance process and shore up our infrastructure. It wasn't as easy as some marketing around these platforms suggests, you still need real work to show evidence of adherence. Since becoming compliant, it's helped restart conversations with large institutional gatekeepers like procurement.
What advice would you give an aspiring fintech founder trying to bring transparency to an opaque market?
The advice is pretty universal, not specific to PM Insights. You need to be very stringent about identifying your core customer groups and their pain points early on, then iterate quickly. Focus has been the most important thing, and something we sometimes lacked. Trying to do too many things or please too many customer types at once is a road to potential disaster.
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