When Charles Schwab's CEO Rick Wurster announced his firm's acquisition of Forge Global in November 2025—a deal that closed in March 2026—he reached for a comparison that was either audacious or apt, depending on your tolerance for corporate mission statements. The deal, he said, would "democratize private investing" much as Schwab once cracked open public markets for ordinary Americans decades ago.
Bold words. But consider what's happened to private capital: North American assets under management hit $8.46 trillion by mid-2025, per Preqin's tallies. Private equity deal value climbed 19 percent in 2025 to $2.6 trillion, McKinsey reported in February 2026. And for most of the past several decades, nearly all of that wealth sat behind velvet ropes—accessible only to institutions and the ultra-wealthy.
Now something's shifting. Not through sweeping regulatory mandates, but through a messier, more incremental buildup of technology and infrastructure. AI-powered diligence platforms are collapsing weeks of analyst work into hours. Tokenized securities promise to turn illiquid startup shares into something closer to tradable instruments. Semi-liquid fund structures—interval funds, tender-offer vehicles, Europe's newly revamped Long-Term Investment Funds—are packaging private market exposure in wrappers designed for retail consumption.
The machinery is being assembled piece by piece, deal by deal. Whether it adds up to true democratization or just a new set of gatekeepers is another question entirely.
Consolidation as Infrastructure
Schwab's Forge deal wasn't an isolated move. It brought secondary trading workflows, single-company funds, and the Forge Private Market Index under one roof—specifically, a brokerage serving millions of retail accounts. Initially, distribution will target ultra-high-net-worth clients and registered investment advisors. But Schwab has signaled plans to go broader through '40 Act funds and deeper platform integration, which could eventually mean exposure for Main Street investors who qualify.
Republic, the equity crowdfunding platform, closed its acquisition of INX—a security-token alternative trading system—in November 2025 for up to roughly $60 million in total consideration. The combination strengthens distribution and secondary liquidity for tokenized private securities, including Republic Note, which now trades on INX infrastructure. CEO Kendrick Nguyen framed it as a move to "reshape access" to financial markets. Familiar language, though coming from a very different corner of the industry.
Elsewhere, equity crowdfunding platforms have been quietly consolidating. StartEngine bought SeedInvest assets back in May 2023. By 2024, it reported $143 million in "online capital formation" and launched StartEngine Private, which raised $27 million across 35 series offerings that year. Wefunder posted second-quarter 2024 revenue of $5.22 million and profit of $1.74 million, and has publicly stated plans to "use AI to improve our product" and enhance due-diligence sharing among investors. In Europe, Crowdcube has started productizing managed secondaries—orchestrated liquidity events for early-stage investors in companies like Moneybox, which executed a roughly £70 million institutional secondary in late 2024.
The pattern here isn't subtle: platforms are no longer just matchmakers between startups and capital. They're building end-to-end infrastructure—primary issuance, secondary trading, tokenization, fund wrappers—to serve a retail audience that, five years ago, had almost no entry point.
The AI Acceleration
If infrastructure is the foundation, artificial intelligence is the accelerant. On January 19, 2026, Hebbia announced it had integrated Preqin datasets into its AI document-intelligence workflows, streamlining diligence, fundraising analysis, and market mapping for private markets professionals. Two months later, MSCI launched Vantager, an AI-powered due diligence platform designed to speed pre-investment workflows for limited partners. S&P Global and its Kensho unit have expanded generative AI tools through Capital IQ Pro Labs since late 2024, allowing users to query private and public data with AI agents. In December 2025, S&P announced AWS integration for those same agent capabilities.
Schroders Capital deployed something it calls GAiiA—a virtual "investment committee agent" that drafts IC memos and answers diligence queries. The firm expanded it across private equity in 2025. Crunchbase launched AI Search Builder, which translates investor theses into company queries, automating what used to require manual filtering across databases. KingsCrowd uses a proprietary ratings algorithm overlaid with human analyst reviews to score Regulation Crowdfunding and Regulation A+ deals, helping retail investors triage hundreds of offerings that might otherwise blend together.
For wealth advisors and RIAs, platforms like TIFIN Helix (built in partnership with Hamilton Lane) and CAIS are embedding AI assistants that surface funds, automate diligence reports, and align recommendations with firm strategy. CAIS has also announced plans for AI "agents" to proactively resolve fund operations, documentation, and lifecycle tasks—shifting from tools that help humans make decisions to tools that act semi-autonomously.
The regulatory posture remains principles-based, perhaps more cautious than prescriptive. The SEC withdrew its "predictive data analytics" conflicts-of-interest proposal in June 2025. But FINRA's 2026 Annual Regulatory Oversight Report makes clear that firms must apply existing supervision rules—Rule 3110, Regulation Best Interest, fiduciary standards—to generative AI workflows. Recordkeeping, vendor risk, and testing are now table stakes, not optional enhancements.
The Numbers Tell a Complicated Story
U.S. equity crowdfunding posted $924.8 million across Regulation Crowdfunding and Regulation A+ in 2025, according to KingsCrowd's annual report published in February 2026. Reg CF alone rose 11 percent year-over-year to $378.3 million, though that came despite 29 percent fewer new offerings. Capital is concentrating into stronger campaigns, not scattering across hundreds of early-stage bets.
That concentration might be the most revealing detail. SEC staff data show Reg CF commitments fell to roughly $249 million for the period from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024—down from approximately $352 million the prior period. The total market, blending Reg CF and the larger Reg A+ exemption, reached just under $925 million in 2025. That's substantial, but hardly explosive growth for a market that's been open since 2016.
For context, McKinsey reports that "higher-liquidity" vehicles such as interval funds, tender-offer funds, and private business development companies accounted for 25 to 30 percent of year-over-year alternatives AUM growth in 2025. These structures grew at a 15 to 20 percent compound annual rate from 2020 to 2025. Retail-friendly structures are gaining share, but they're doing it through semi-liquid wrappers managed by institutions—not through direct startup equity on crowdfunding portals.
One exception worth noting: ARK Invest added OpenAI private shares across three ETFs in early 2026, each with roughly a 3 percent allocation. Axios reported OpenAI also sold about $3 billion of shares to individual investors via private placement around the same time. It's a high-profile example of retail exposure to a major private AI company, but it's also an outlier. Most investors can't access pre-IPO stakes in frontier tech firms through an ETF wrapper, and they probably won't anytime soon.
Semi-Liquid Wrappers Take the Lead
The real momentum in retail private market access isn't happening on equity crowdfunding platforms—at least not yet. It's happening in interval funds, tender-offer funds, and European structures like ELTIFs and the UK's Long-Term Asset Funds.
ESMA has proposed changes to ELTIF technical standards to enhance retail access, with guidance issued to calibrate liquidity, redemptions, and cross-border retail distribution. In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority approved LTAFs with approximately £7.3 billion in AUM as of April 2026, per Morningstar analysis. LTAFs became eligible for Individual Savings Accounts starting in April 2026—a policy shift that could accelerate broader retail uptake. M&G launched its Diversified Private Credit LTAF in March 2025 as one early mover.
Moonfare, a European platform offering ELTIF access with minimums around €10,000, reported €3 billion in AUM in June 2024. State Street Global Advisors published a December 2025 brief enumerating democratization pathways via ELTIF 2.0, interval funds, and LTAFs for retail channels.
In the U.S., platforms like iCapital—which had more than $206 billion in global platform assets as of recent communications—and CAIS, which reaches 62,000 advisors and is planning secondaries with LODAS Markets as of October 2025, are building model portfolios and streamlining KYC, AML, and subscription workflows. A November 2025 CAIS–Mercer survey found advisors increasingly view alternatives as structural to portfolios, with administrative burden decreasing thanks to platform digitization and education tools.
These aren't crowdfunding portals. They're institutional-grade distribution engines serving RIAs, family offices, and increasingly, mass-affluent clients who meet suitability thresholds but aren't accredited in the traditional sense.
What Comes Next
Preqin's September 2024 report projected that global alternatives AUM could exceed $30 trillion by 2030, with private equity growing from $5.8 trillion at the end of 2023 to $12 trillion by 2029. If those forecasts hold—and that's a meaningful "if"—the pressure to open access will intensify. Not out of altruism, but because asset managers need distribution and retail capital represents trillions in untapped demand.
The question is what form that access ultimately takes. Semi-liquid wrappers appear to be winning in the near term. Schwab's integration of Forge may seed retail-oriented private market funds or indices referencing curated secondaries. Republic's INX infrastructure is in place for tokenized startup equity, but broad adoption depends on issuer appetite, cost structures, and regulatory clarity that hasn't fully materialized.
AI is shifting from "assistive" to "agentic" in diligence and operations. Formal integrations like Hebbia–Preqin, S&P–AWS, and MSCI's diligence tech indicate this is becoming mainstream rather than experimental. Supervisory expectations—per FINRA's 2026 report—will likely push auditability, provenance, and control layers into these tools, which could slow deployment or at least reshape how they're marketed. Worth noting: many AI claims across platforms remain aspirational, roadmap-stage features rather than deployed products.
For founders considering equity crowdfunding, the data suggests a sobering reality: capital is concentrating into fewer, stronger deals. For retail investors, direct startup exposure remains niche, while semi-liquid funds offer diversified private market beta without the lock-up or illiquidity of a single angel check. For financial advisors and wealth professionals, the infrastructure is finally maturing—platform integrations, AI copilots, model portfolios—to make alternatives a core allocation rather than a boutique offering.
The $8.46 trillion private market isn't democratizing in the Silicon Valley sense of radical disintermediation and universal access. It's democratizing in the Schwab sense: institutions building scale, technology reducing friction, and retail investors gaining exposure through products designed for mass distribution. Whether that's enough depends on what you think democratization means in the first place—and whether you believe the next decade will look anything like the last.
