Ask for a trade-in quote on a client’s car and the number comes back in seconds: mileage, condition, what similar models sold for last week. Now ask what the client’s pre-IPO stock options are worth. There’s no comparable answer. The only number on file is the 409A from the company’s last funding round, whenever that happened to be, and nobody has touched it since. For RIAs, that gap has stopped being a rounding error and started being a real practice problem.
When the Private Sleeve Stops Being a Footnote
Private markets aren’t a side allocation anymore. According to KKR’s 2025 RIA survey, nearly half of advisors now put 10% or more of client AUM into private markets, and most expect that share to hold or grow over the next five years. Layer on top of that the clients who arrive with private exposure already baked in: equity comp from a pre-IPO employer, a secondary picked up along the way, an old fund commitment. Pricing stops being a footnote and becomes a live question on every review. An advisor has a fiduciary duty to have a reasonable basis for what they tell a client a position is worth. “Whatever the last round said” doesn’t really clear that bar.
Built From Documents Most Advisors Never See
The Prime Unicorn Index family is a group of rules-based, modified market cap price return indexes tracking U.S. venture-backed companies valued at $1 billion or more: the Prime Unicorn™ Composite Index, with 234 components, and the Prime Unicorn™ 30 Index, home to names like SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, and Anduril. Every price change derives from publicly available, hard-to-source documents, paired with closed secondary transactions sourced through our partner, Caplight. Values are published weekly, and the index is reconstituted quarterly, a discipline it has maintained since launching in 2017 as the market’s first private company index. No self-reported marks. No waiting on the company to tell you what it thinks it’s worth.
A Benchmark That Fits Into the Review, Not Around It
This is where the Index earns its place in an advisory practice. It gives you a defensible, independently sourced number to bring into a review instead of a shrug, turning a vague “I don’t have a current, up-to-date valuation for this position” into a specific conversation about concentration risk, exercise timing, and diversification. The same discipline already applies to the public sleeve: independent sourcing, a transparent methodology, no self-reported marks to take on faith. Now it reaches the corner of the portfolio that’s historically resisted it.
A client wouldn’t sit still for a trade-in quote that’s two years old. They shouldn’t have to sit still for a valuation that’s just as stale. For RIAs, the Prime Unicorn Index turns the hardest question in the portfolio review, “What is this actually worth right now?” into one you can answer with data instead of a guess.
Want more data on Unicorn companies, including funding and valuation history, secondary transactions, and more? Email Contact@PrimeUnicornIndex.com or Call 646-290-9254.