Here is a thing that is true and slightly absurd about startup compensation: you can be granted a fortune in stock options, vest all of them, and still end up with nothing. The options are not shares. They are the right to buy shares at a fixed price, and that right comes with a bill. When you leave the company - or get laid off, or the company drifts along privately for a decade - you generally have about 90 days to write a check to convert your options into actual stock. If the company has grown, that check can also come with a tax bill on paper gains you cannot yet sell. Many people, quite reasonably, do not have the cash. So they walk away from the equity that was supposedly the whole point of joining a startup.
The equity was the pitch. The exercise cost was the catch. Nobody put the catch on the recruiting slide.
Equitybee's founders - Oren Barzilai, Oded Golan and Mody Radashkovich, three childhood friends with a combined couple of decades in tech and finance - watched this happen to people they knew. In 2017 they built a marketplace around it. The mechanics are elegantly simple, which is usually the sign that the hard part is somewhere you can't see. An employee who can't afford to exercise lists their situation. An accredited investor agrees to put up the cash to exercise the options. In exchange, when a liquidity event finally arrives - an IPO, an acquisition, a tender offer - the investor takes an agreed share of the proceeds. The employee keeps the rest, and crucially keeps shares they otherwise would have forfeited. Equitybee sits in the middle and takes a fee.
What makes this interesting is not the fee. It's the asymmetry the fee is arbitraging. The employee has something valuable - the right to buy stock in a company they know well - but no capital. The investor has capital but no access; the good pre-IPO companies do not, as a rule, take checks from individuals. Equitybee introduces the two. The employee gets funded with, in the company's telling, no out-of-pocket cost. The investor gets exposure to a private company they could not otherwise touch. It is a two-sided marketplace where both sides were previously stuck for opposite reasons.
The first check into all of this came, memorably, from Adam Neumann, the WeWork co-founder, who led a $1.5 million seed round in 2018. That is the kind of detail that could read as a warning or a curiosity depending on the year, but it worked: in February 2021 Group 11 led a $20 million Series A, and by September the same firm led a $55 million Series B, with Battery Ventures and others along for it. All told, Equitybee has raised roughly $85 million. In 2022 Forbes put it on its Next Billion-Dollar Startups list.
The number the company likes to point at is a 55.5% average net realized internal rate of return on investments that reached liquidity. You should treat any single IRR figure with the suspicion it deserves - it measures the deals that worked, over a specific stretch, and averages are load-bearing. But the underlying structural point is real and a little clever: because Equitybee's deals attach to employee options, they flow through a channel that traditional venture funds mostly can't use. When the IPO market froze after 2021 and stayed frozen, that channel kept moving. The company's own 2025 liquidity tracking leans heavily on tender offers and secondary sales - fourteen tender-offer events tracked in 2025 alone - precisely the exits that don't require a company to go public to pay people.
Investors chase the IPO. Equitybee learned to get paid on everything that happens before one.
The list of companies where funded employees eventually cashed out reads like a decade of tech: Monday, Unity, Palantir, Airbnb, Affirm, Procore, Oscar Health, Coursera, Payoneer, Confluent, 23andMe. To date the platform says it has helped more than 4,000 employees exercise their options and has funded over $100 million across more than 730 pre-IPO companies.
Lately the company has been doing the thing marketplaces do once they trust their flow: packaging it. In 2024 it launched the Venture Portfolio Fund, an index-like vehicle spanning 120-plus pre-IPO U.S. companies, so an investor can buy the basket instead of hand-picking option deals one at a time. In 2025 it stood up an advisory board aimed at registered investment advisors, the professionals who allocate other people's money and had, until recently, almost no clean way to put clients into private startups. Both moves point the same direction - away from a niche pain point and toward something that looks like an asset class.
Whether pre-IPO option financing becomes a durable corner of finance or a product of a particular, liquidity-starved moment is the open question, and Equitybee is betting hard on the former. But the original insight holds up regardless of the macro. Startup equity is sold as a reward and structured as a liability you have to fund yourself. Equitybee simply noticed that gap was large enough to build a company inside - and then invited investors in to help pay for it.