Authors: David Laroque (Managing Director & Co Head of Secondaries) and Ramsey Daunch (Associate) at Stifel Europe, an investment bank advising growth companies and their shareholders on M&A, private and public growth financing, equity and debt capital solutions.
It’s a familiar scene: the founder of a new mobility company walks into a board meeting to chart the next phase of growth but the conversation veers off-piste. Concerns are raised around IPO timelines and liquidity. Attrition is climbing among key hires and locked-up employee shares are cited as a recurring complaint.
With IPO and M&A exit roadmaps having extended significantly in recent years, these dynamics are playing out across growth-stage mobility companies globally. The smartest founders and their advisors aren’t waiting for an exit to resolve them – they’re reaching for secondaries, enabling existing shareholders to sell their shares to new investors.
When the cap table becomes the problem
Mobility companies carry an unusually complex stakeholder burden.
A typical growth-stage player in the space might count early-stage VCs, growth equity funds, corporate venture arms, angel investors, founders and senior employees all on the same cap table, each with different liquidity timelines, returns expectations and strategic agendas. That complexity is manageable when an exit is on the horizon. When it isn’t, it becomes a governance and retention problem.
This is the reality for much of the mobility sector today. IPO windows have narrowed, strategic acquirers are more selective and the exit timelines that investors underwrote three or four years ago have extended.
The secondary market has grown sharply in response. Stifel estimates that there were more than $77bn in company-led secondary transactions in 2025 alone, surpassing the last two years of technology IPO issuance combined. But the more important shift is qualitative: secondaries are no longer a last resort. The most sophisticated mobility companies are using them as a proactive tool to manage their cap tables, retain talent and set up cleaner paths to exit.
Secondaries as liquidity tools that work for everyone
For growth-stage mobility companies, a well-executed secondary round is that rare thing in private markets: a transaction where the interests of every party genuinely converge.
The most underappreciated benefit runs to the company itself. A secondary round is an opportunity to actively curate the investor base, replacing shareholders whose timelines or agendas no longer fit with long-term partners better aligned to the next stage of the journey. Done well, it also simplifies governance, reduces the friction that comes with a crowded and misaligned cap table and strengthens the company’s positioning for a future financing or public listing. Liquidity management, in this sense, is strategic management.
The benefits to other stakeholders follow naturally. Early employees and founders gain enough partial liquidity to diversify personal wealth and reduce financial pressure without requiring an exit that may still be years away. Early investors unlock a path to return capital to their LPs and ease fund-life constraints that would otherwise just create pressure at the board level. And incoming investors get something increasingly scarce: direct access to a leading growth-stage private company at an inflection point, in a market where primary rounds in the best names are rarely available to new entrants.
The result is a transaction structure with no obvious losers, which goes some way to explaining why the market has grown as fast as it has.
The art and science of executing secondaries
Executing a successful secondary round isn’t just about matching buyers and sellers. It requires careful navigation of share class dynamics, investor rights, pricing strategy and a sound understanding of the legal nuances of the transfer mechanics within the shareholder’s agreement.
What often surprises first-time secondary issuers is the breadth of investor appetite on the buy-side. The secondary market has matured well beyond its early reputation as a niche corner of private markets. Today there is more than $5.7bn of dedicated venture secondary dry powder, distributed amongst dedicated venture secondary funds, growth equity and crossover investors, sovereign wealth funds, family offices and private wealth platforms – each bringing different return profiles, hold periods and strategic value to the table.
For a mobility company running a well-advised process, that diversity creates genuine competitive tension and gives the company choice over who joins the cap table.
One notable example is Uber, which in the years leading up to its IPO orchestrated one of the largest secondary operations in private markets. By facilitating a major tender offer led by SoftBank, Uber provided significant liquidity to early shareholders and employees, while simultaneously bringing in a strategic partner who could support its post-IPO trajectory. The process helped Uber consolidate its cap table, reduce internal friction, and set a clear path toward a successful listing.
In Europe, Blablacar made waves when it announced a proactive and ambitious employee share programme that facilitated partial liquidity for nearly one hundred current and former employees. This allowed these core contributors to the Blablacar growth story to tap into their newfound wealth to finance personal projects and expenses.
The lesson for mobility companies today is straightforward. A well-run secondary process, properly advised, fosters competitive tension among buyers, enhances pricing outcomes and ensures transparency for all parties. The companies that treat it as a forward-looking, strategic exercise tend to come out with a cleaner cap table, stronger governance and a more aligned investor base heading into their next phase of growth.
Looking to the future – secondaries as a permanent fixture
Across the mobility sector, secondaries have emerged as a mechanism that bridges the liquidity gap, allowing growth to continue uninterrupted while ensuring that the people most invested in the outcome, in every sense, can access the value they have helped create. What was once a niche activity is now a boardroom-level conversation at the most sophisticated mobility companies in Europe.
At Stifel, we have advised on some of the most complex secondary processes in the sector. Our role is to guide clients through every layer of that complexity from strategic planning to settlement mechanics, while solving for an optimal outcome for all stakeholders involved. In a market moving this fast, getting that process right matters more than ever.
