The Unlock Cleared

The most feared date on this year's private market calendar was August 6, the day SpaceX's lockup opened. The script was written in advance: 911.5 million insider shares, 43% more than the whole IPO float, hit a 4.9% float, and gravity does the rest.

The float more than doubled. More than 255 million shares traded. The stock rose 6.1%.

In July I called this the test: absorb the unlock without breaking issue, and the next tier's marks hold and the S-1 queue keeps moving. I will take the win, with one caveat volunteered early: the stock broke issue the day before, on earnings, falling almost 14% to $108.27 on a capital expenditure surprise. The market shrugged at 911.5 million shares of supply and choked on one capex line. Markets are like this. By August 10 it was back above the $135 issue; it closed at $136.07 on August 24.

The queue read the result the same way I did. Anthropic, confidentially filed since June 1, is targeting an October Nasdaq listing on a raise reported above $60 billion, with investor expectations at $2 trillion or more against the $965 billion round it closed in May, per Fortune. That would be the largest IPO in history, a record SpaceX will have held for about 4 months. Records used to last decades. Now they last a summer. OpenAI closed a $7 billion employee tender at $852 billion on August 10, per CNBC. The two biggest names left on the tape are acting like the door is open, because it is.

Now the part the mechanical read missed, mine included. July's lockup math said recycled SpaceX capital cannot reach new private positions until the first half of 2027, implying a soft window for patient buyers to name their price. The buyer base declined to participate.

Databricks went out for $1 billion this month, was shown $15 billion, and took $5 billion at a $190 billion post-money, closed August 13, on a business running above $7 billion growing more than 80% a year. When demand outruns the ask 15 to 1, oversubscribed is the polite word. Rationed is the accurate one. The secondary tape got the message: Notice's composite mark sat about 8% below the announced terms on August 4, and Forge's mark sat about 1% above the closed round by August 19. A discount became a premium in 15 days.

Perplexity spent the summer marked near $20 billion. On August 23 The Information reported Nvidia in talks to invest several billion dollars at a valuation above $30 billion. The business underneath is annualizing above $750 million in revenue, from under $250 million at the start of the year, the kind of growth that makes a buyer forgive a lot of multiple. If that round lands anywhere near the reported number, every $20 billion mark becomes a museum piece overnight. Anyone offering you Perplexity paper priced off the old round is either doing you a genuine favor or has not read the news. Establish which before wiring anything.

Anduril's last round priced in May at $68.95 a share, a $61 billion valuation. Forge's mid-August mark is $127.37, roughly 85% above a round barely a quarter old, while the $100 billion round reported in late July sits unclosed. Early holders are in no hurry, and at these marks I understand why.

None of this is a general melt-up. Forge's August update has the median secondary trade at a 7% discount to the last round in July, against par in June, the strongest tape since early 2022 and a long way from the 50% median discounts of 2022 and 2023. The dispersion is where it gets interesting if you still run a discount screen. Cut by vintage, the same tape reads like carbon dating: zero discount if the last raise was 2026, 4.7% for 2025, then a cliff to 54.1% for 2022 and 59.1% for 2021. The market is not pricing the business. It is pricing the date on the term sheet.

The buy side is spending down its shelf to do it. Evercore has secondary dry powder at $194 billion, down from roughly $215 billion at the start of the year, with volume at a $300 billion annual pace. One market is short inventory. The other is short a bid. They share a word and nothing else.

And the shelf is refilling from the top. Forge titled its August update "$100 billion is the new $10 billion": Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI reached that mark in under a third of the time the last generation needed. Multiples counts the 10 largest venture rounds of the summer at $42.7 billion, led by Prometheus's $12 billion June round at $41 billion, 7 months after launch. In May I argued the buyer base was waiting for the next set of names. The next set is arriving, pre-priced at scale, transfer-restricted, and rationed at the door. Even the plumbing agrees: Precedence Research, a data vendor, sizes SPV administration and services at $13.9 billion this year, projected to $26.7 billion by 2035.

The distinction worth carrying into the fall: the unlock arrived priced as the year's biggest supply event and traded like a formality. The thing everyone hedged cleared in an afternoon. The scarce resource is access to fresh names at fresh prices. That is why $15 billion chased a $1 billion raise, and why the names the market wants trade at premiums.

What to do with this. If your pacing assumed a soft window while lockup capital thaws in 2027, the market did not get the memo; the demand you planned to outbid showed up early and brought friends. If you still screen on discount, know what the screen now returns: 2021 and 2022 vintages, which is homework, not bargains. Underwrite the next anchor, not the last one, and read any quoted discount as a claim about the age of the mark. And watch the calendar: an Anthropic public filing re-anchors every private AI mark at once, and a position that looks conservatively carried today can be stale by Thanksgiving without anything changing at the company.

One from the desk. We counted the Anthropic marks circulating this month: $692.39 a share on Nasdaq Private Market as of August 11, $1.2 trillion implied at Caplight, and tokenized contracts implying roughly $1.8 trillion. Three numbers, one company, one month. That spread is a liquidity artifact, not price discovery. When almost nobody is selling, every print is an opinion with a decimal point. If someone quotes you an Anthropic mark without a provider and a date attached, they are quoting you a mood.

I want the fill data this time. If you went after allocation in any of the summer's rounds, directly or through an SPV, how much of your ask got filled, and at what economics? Reply in the comments or message me.

Housekeeping: Off-Primary is now biweekly. Twice as often, still free. Next issue lands September 9.

Prince Capital prices this queue weekly across our secondaries practice. If you are sizing an entry against a fresh anchor, holding stale-vintage paper that needs a real bid, or working out whether your access is worth what you pay for it, we welcome the conversation. Reach out at info@theprincecg.com.

Prince Capital is a family office private investment firm. This material is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security.