EquityBee

EquityBee is a Silicon Valley-based platform founded in 2018 that solves a specific problem in the pre-IPO startup world: employees at private companies often have valuable stock options they can't afford to exercise, because doing so requires paying the strike price plus taxes — often totaling tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars — on equity that may or may not ever become liquid. EquityBee connects those employees with accredited investors who provide the capital needed to exercise the options, in exchange for a pre-negotiated share of the future value when the company IPOs, gets acquired, or the employee sells on the secondary market. The platform has raised over $70 million in venture funding from investors including ICONIQ Capital and has facilitated deals in 1,000+ private companies since inception.

From the investor's perspective, EquityBee offers a novel way to gain exposure to late-stage private companies — including names like SpaceX, Stripe, Databricks, and others — with minimums typically starting at $10,000 per deal. Each deal is a bilateral agreement between the investor and a specific employee at a specific company, structured as a loan-plus-equity-share contract that pays out only upon a liquidity event. Investors typically receive 40%–50% of the eventual profit on the exercised shares, with the employee keeping the remainder and using EquityBee's capital to turn an otherwise-unaffordable opportunity into real equity. The platform charges a 5% fee to employees on funded deals and does not charge fees to investors directly — investors pay a spread built into the deal terms.