"You Are Probably Missing Private Tech": A Conversation with Stableton's Andreas Bezner

This newsletter is part of The Assetizer, GenTwo's thought leadership platform.

I first met Andreas Bezner in February 2025 when he was a panelist at a GenTwo private markets event I moderated. We have kept in touch since, and he joined us more recently for a webinar on making private markets bankable.

As co-founder and CEO of Stableton, one of our longest-standing clients at GenTwo, he has been as close to the private markets space as anyone I know. Stableton is a Zurich-based, FINMA-regulated asset manager with a passive, index-based strategy giving investors systematic access to the 20 most valuable privately held technology companies in the world.

The most valuable technology companies are increasingly choosing to stay private longer, which means that is increasingly where the real value creation is happening. Stableton is one of the clearest proof points of that argument, and I sat down with Andreas recently to understand how he got here, what the company actually does, and why it might matter for how we all think about private markets.

The Long Road to an Obvious Idea

Bezner did not arrive at private markets through the usual route. His first professional steps were in an Ernst & Young office full of folders, poring over transaction documents late into the night. The work was private equity due diligence: modeling, valuations, traditional buyouts, carve-outs, cost efficiencies, financial structuring. “The playbook was to optimize operations, apply leverage, and drive incremental growth,” he recalls.

He grew increasingly dissatisfied. “Private equity was unlocking value by financial engineering and reshuffling existing assets rather than backing innovation,” he says. The question he kept returning to was where the real wealth creation was actually happening. The answer seemed obvious. The most valuable companies in the world were all technology companies, compounding for years through continuous disruption. By the time public investors could participate, most of the value creation was already done.

“Private equity was unlocking value by financial engineering rather than backing innovation.”

He left to found his own hedge fund, a long-short equity strategy with a technology focus that he ran for several years. The fund, he says, performed exceptionally well throughout the Great Financial Crisis, but the experience taught him something he has carried with him ever since.

“The biggest lesson was to step off the hamster wheel of trading and let great companies compound your money over long periods of time,” he says. After selling his stake in the hedge fund company he co-founded, he spent years working with wealth managers and family offices and helping alternative asset managers establish themselves in the wealth channel. He kept seeing the same problem. Private investments and the wealth channel were, in his words, like mixing oil and water. Complex structures, high minimums, long lock-ups: none of it worked for the private wealth channel.

Meanwhile, as a graduate student in 2003, Bezner had written his master’s thesis on the secondary market for private equity, at a time when secondaries were barely a recognized asset class.

That insight stayed with him. What he had identified was a fundamental gap: private markets had no real liquidity mechanism. Investors could put money in, but getting it out was almost impossible without an IPO or a buyout. As companies began staying private for longer, that gap could only grow. He was convinced the secondary market would eventually become essential.

By the time he co-founded Stableton in 2018, all of those threads had converged. The thesis was ready to become a business.

Building Stableton

The founding idea, as Bezner describes it, was to build a bridge between private markets and the investors who had been locked out of them. The existing products were not built for the wealth channel. Even within the industry, private markets were stuck in an outdated mode of operating: ad hoc decision-making, relationship-driven sourcing, manual processes, and no systematic approach or data infrastructure.

“I wanted a tech- and data-driven asset manager,” he says, “one that could move at the pace this market actually demands.” He calls what they built an operating system for private markets.

That vision eventually crystallized into the Stableton Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 strategy: the 20 most valuable private blue-chip technology companies, in one portfolio, through an index-based approach. Most of the industry, he notes with evident satisfaction, said it could not work. Today the company has completed over 175 transactions, holds close to $1 billion in assets under management, and sits as an institutional investor on the cap tables of more than 30 leading unicorns.

Bezner likes to describe Stableton as the Vanguard of growth equity, and the parallel is more than rhetorical. John Bogle launched the first index mutual fund with $11 million in assets and most of the industry told him it was a bad idea. His low-cost, client-first approach eventually reshaped public markets entirely.

“What Bogle did for public markets is what we are doing for the private market,” says Bezner. “He took an asset class dominated by expensive, actively managed funds and made it accessible through a low-cost, systematic, index-based approach. We are doing exactly the same thing, just in private markets.”

“What Vanguard did for public markets is what we are doing for the private market.”

This raises an obvious question. How do you build a rules-based index in a market with no exchange, no continuous price feed, and no shared governance framework?

The answer starts with the right partner. Stableton’s strategy is built around the Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 Index, co-developed with Morningstar, which brings what Bezner describes as public-market-grade governance, methodology, and compliance to a market that has historically lacked all three.

The universe is defined by Morningstar and PitchBook data: the 20 most valuable privately held technology companies in developed markets with liquid secondary markets. The weighting is equal across all 20 companies. Pricing is handled by Morningstar’s proprietary mark-to-market model, drawing on data from specialized secondary market providers, and now covering more than 1,750 unicorns. Reconstitutions happen on a regular schedule, when companies IPO or new leaders emerge, with no discretionary manager judgment involved.

The shares themselves come from the direct secondary market: founders, early employees, and early investors looking for liquidity before an IPO. Stableton’s position on the cap tables of leading unicorns is what makes sourcing possible at scale.

“That gives us access, allocations, and insight that most investors simply cannot get,” Bezner says. The fund is semi-liquid: monthly subscriptions, quarterly redemptions at net asset value. That is a meaningful change from the decade-long lock-ups of traditional private equity.

Where the Real Value Lies

In 1999, the average technology company went public after four years. By 2024, that number had reached 13.5 years. Companies are staying private nearly three times longer than they did a generation ago, which means that roughly a decade of growth that used to happen inside public portfolios now happens entirely in private markets.

The scale of what is being missed is larger than most investors assume. According to Forge data, unicorns going public between 2019 and 2025 appreciated at a median annual rate of 65.7% between reaching a billion-dollar valuation and their IPO. The 20 most valuable private technology companies are today larger than the bottom 155 companies in the S&P 500, and 17 of those 20 would qualify for the Nasdaq 100 if they were public.

“If you are sitting in a private bank or family office today,” says Bezner, “you are probably missing something.”

“By the time a company like OpenAI or Anthropic goes public the majority of the growth will already be behind it.”

The traditional portfolio model was designed for an era when allocating to private markets at scale was not possible. That era is over. Public and private markets are converging into a spectrum, and where an investor sits on that spectrum is now a deliberate choice.

Nowhere is this more striking than in artificial intelligence. AI now accounts for nearly two-thirds of all primary deal value in 2025. Series B AI startups are trading at a median 2.1 times valuation step-up, compared to 1.4 times for non-AI companies at the same stage. A few years ago, Bezner observes, AI was a sub-sector. Today it sets the benchmark for late-stage private technology pricing. OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at a scale that would place them among the largest public technology companies in the world. They are not listed on any exchange.

“By the time a company like OpenAI or Anthropic goes public,” he says, “the majority of the growth will already be behind it. If your AI exposure is only through public companies, you are capturing the second half of the story at best.”

The Wrapper

This is where GenTwo enters the picture. Stableton distributes its strategy through Actively Managed Certificates, a product structure with a Swiss ISIN that can be held, traded, and reported through standard brokerage and banking systems. Traditional private equity vehicles require subscription documents, capital call schedules, and minimums that typically start at $100,000. An AMC trades through a standard brokerage account, which changes the distribution calculus entirely. The fund charges no performance fees, in contrast to the traditional “2 and 20” fee model that combines an annual management fee with a performance fee on gains. The regulatory structure is clean: Swiss ISIN, FINMA-regulated, with a Luxembourg-based SICAV-RAIF available for international investors.

The distribution story has two channels. The institutional side now encompasses more than 150 banks, wealth managers, family offices, and institutional investors. The retail channel is where the story becomes genuinely interesting. Swissquote, one of Switzerland’s largest online banks and another close partner of GenTwo, is Stableton’s exclusive retail partner in the country. Through Swissquote, private investors can access the Unicorn 20 AMC with a minimum investment of $200 and a flat transaction fee of $9. “The same platform you use to buy ETFs,” Bezner says, “now gives you exposure to the 20 most valuable private technology companies in the world.” He is not wrong.

“The same platform you use to buy ETFs now gives you exposure to the 20 most valuable private technology companies in the world.”

The Long Game

Five years from now, Bezner wants Stableton to sit alongside public equity in every serious portfolio as the default allocation for private blue-chip technology. The secondary market is already pointing in that direction. Transaction volume is growing 41% year on year, secondaries now rival IPO and M&A as an exit channel, and the overall market stands at roughly $162 billion, with direct secondaries alone reaching around $80 billion in 2025. That is a market that barely existed as a recognized category when a young graduate student in Switzerland wrote a thesis on it in 2003 and received good marks, and nothing more.

The 23-year gap between the insight and the vindication is, in its own way, the most compelling thing about the Stableton story.

All the best,
Tom