EquityZen: 2015 by the Numbers

With 2015 officially in the rearview mirror, we wanted to take a few minutes to look back at what an amazing year it was for our company. Founded in June 2013, last year was our second full year in business and we are extremely proud of our growth and the overall activity on our platform. We thought it would be interesting and insightful to dig into the numbers on our platform to make some data-driven observations that may shed further light on a growing, and admittedly opaque, industry. Who's buying? What are they buying? And how much?

As a headline, we doubled our team yet grew transaction volume 10X. This is a testament to the strength of the team and our unwavering commitment to customer service and being a technology-driven platform.

Digging deeper, let’s start with our client base:

• Most of our domestic investors hail from either The Golden State, The Empire State, or the Lone Star State (bonus points if you knew that was California, New York, or Texas)
• We had investors from five out of seven continents complete a transaction on our platform (shockingly, no-one from Antarctica invested)

We also looked at the types of companies in which our clients transacted:

• From a sector perspective, Data Analytics and Enterprise Software companies had the most traction
• On average, companies had raised approximately $450 million in total funding and were valued on average at $2.7 Billion
• Over 60% of the companies were based in California
• Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz had backed the most companies on our platform in 2015

On a lighter note, some interesting facts and figures about the engine driving all of this – our team. As we mentioned at the outset, we doubled our team size, which resulted in:

• Consuming 16 wholesale-size jars of Gummy Vitamins
• Devouring approximately 1,652 donut holes (also known as “Munchkins” for all of you East Coasters)
• Visiting our local street cart no less than 200 times so we could have our weekly fill of hot sauce-laden Chicken Biryani
• Playing Drake’s “Hotline Bling” at least twice a day…  
• … despite having the music video playing on repeat in our office 

We’re looking forward to meeting and working with more company representatives, investors, and shareholders in 2016.  We have ambitious goals to expand our platform, improve the client experience, increase awareness about the secondary markets in general, and, at least for me, eat less donut holes.

Thanks for being part of the EquityZen platform.