In private markets, the house has already read everyone's cards.

For a few years I had a front-row seat to dealmaking at the very top of the market, including a transaction valued at around $26 billion. At that altitude, the information is brutal in its clarity. Filings, disclosures, fairness opinions, regulators who demand to see the math. Public markets are not fair, but they are honest about one thing: material information eventually reaches everyone. The price moves, the news breaks, the 8-K hits the wire. After that, the game is analysis. May the best spreadsheet win.

Then I went looking at the other end of the market, and I could not believe what I found.

Private markets run on the opposite logic. There is no wire. There is no filing. The company that just raised at three times last year's valuation does not owe you, or anyone, an explanation. What you can see depends entirely on who decided to show you. The edge is not analysis. The edge is access.

Access is the business model, not a perk

Let me be precise. In private markets, the people who win consistently are usually not the ones with the best model. They are the ones with the best information position. They knew the founder two startups ago. They saw the round before it was a round. They were in the room when the term sheet got drawn up, and they were invited because of a relationship, not because of a thesis.

This is not a side effect. It is much of the business model. Information hoarding is the product. Allocation in a hot deal is rationed by proximity, not by who did the most rigorous work. The data room opens for people on the list. If you are not on the list, you are not analyzing a bad deal, you are not analyzing anything at all. You are guessing.

For an outsider, this feels like a casino. Worse, it feels like a casino where the house has already read everyone's cards. You sit down, you place your bet on what a company is worth, and the person across the table already knows the answer. They saw the last three rounds, talked to the CFO last week, and watched two competitors quietly fold. You are not playing a game of skill. You are paying tuition.

I have spent my whole career on the inside of rooms like that. I know exactly how much the room is worth. So I built two companies that sit on opposite sides of this gap, on purpose.

Two companies, one fault line

With Value Alpha, I am trying to narrow the gap.

Value Alpha is AI valuation infrastructure for private markets. Roughly 40 sector-specific models, built with Columbia and NYU faculty, because a software company and an industrial roll-up and a clinic chain do not get valued the same way and should never be forced through one generic template. The goal is plain. Give more people a defensible, consistent view of fair value, so pricing leans a little less on the relationship and a little more on the evidence.

I am not pretending I can abolish access. I cannot. But I can change what happens when two parties sit down without symmetric information. If the outsider walks in with a rigorous, transparent, methodologically consistent number, the conversation shifts. The price stops being whatever the insider says it is. It has to answer to something. Narrow the gap, and you take a few cards out of the house's hand.

With Sonnerie VC, I do the opposite. I exploit the gap, honestly.

Sonnerie is my early-stage healthcare venture firm, and healthcare is where this gets interesting. Complex healthcare is one of the few corners of private markets where access alone does not save you. You can be the most connected investor in the room and still lose money, because understanding the science is the actual job. A representative investment is BMI Organ Bank, which is working on kidney regeneration for transplant. You cannot relationship your way to an opinion on that. You have to do the work.

So at Sonnerie, my edge is not who I know. It is what I understand. Operator-grade diligence in a field where most capital cannot tell a real breakthrough from a confident deck. That is an earned edge. I win because I did the harder work, not because I was closer to the deal.

Earned edge versus inherited access

Here is the line I want to draw, as cleanly as I can. There are two ways to win in private markets.

One is inherited access. You win because of where you stand, who let you in, which list you are on. The information came to you because of proximity. You did not earn it, you were positioned for it.

The other is earned edge. You win because you saw more clearly, dug deeper, understood something others missed. The information was available, in principle, to anyone willing to do the work. You just did it.

Both of these win. That is the uncomfortable truth. Inherited access pays, often spectacularly, and it will keep paying for a long time. But only one of these deserves to win. Only one of them makes the market better instead of just extracting from it.

Value Alpha attacks inherited access by making the evidence portable, so fewer outcomes hinge on who you happen to know. Sonnerie leans entirely on earned edge, in a field where there is no shortcut around the work. Different companies, same conviction. The future does not belong to whoever has the most relationships. It belongs to whoever converts opacity into understanding.

That is the bet. Both of my companies are built on it. I left the very top of the market, where every number is modeled and defended, precisely because the rest of the market deserves the same discipline. Public markets reward analysis. Private markets, for now, reward access. I am wagering both companies that the gap between those two is the single biggest opportunity in finance, and that closing it is worth a career.

Common questions

Why are public markets "more honest" than private markets if both can be manipulated?

Honest is not the same as fair. Public markets get manipulated constantly. The difference is structural: material information must eventually be disclosed to everyone, through filings, earnings, and regulated channels. That disclosure resets the game to analysis. In private markets there is no equivalent obligation, so information stays concentrated with whoever was close to the deal, and access, not analysis, decides who wins.

Is it contradictory to build one company that closes the access gap and another that profits from it?

No, and the distinction matters. Value Alpha narrows the gap created by inherited access, the kind of edge that comes purely from proximity and relationships. Sonnerie VC relies on earned edge, the kind that comes from understanding hard science better than the next investor. I am against winning just because you were in the room. I am entirely for winning because you did the harder work. Those are two different things.

How does AI actually reduce the advantage of being an insider?

By making rigorous valuation available to people who are not on the list. Value Alpha runs roughly 40 sector-specific models, built with Columbia and NYU faculty, so an outsider can arrive at a defensible, consistent number instead of accepting whatever the insider quotes. It does not abolish access. It changes the negotiation, because now the price has to answer to transparent evidence rather than to the best-connected person in the room.

Related reading

• Wall Street has Bloomberg. Main Street has a rule of thumb.
• I left billion-dollar deals to price ten-million-dollar businesses.
• What I learned about M&A pricing after running 1,000+ valuations.

Go deeper

If the number matters and the decision is live, work with me, or read where the rest of this thinking lives.

Tomasz Felpel is an investor, founder, and advisor in private markets and healthcare, based in New York. He founded Value Alpha, an AI-powered private-markets valuation platform, and Sonnerie VC, an early-stage healthcare venture firm. Previously he led corporate development and M&A at Fortune 500 scale. Columbia Business School EMBA. Read the full story.