www.bethelfinance.com
Sources inform ''Globes'' that private exchange SecondMarket Inc. is closing its Israeli office less than a year after opening it.
In November 2010, the company appointed Raanan Lachman as VP Israel operations. At the time, SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert said that it expected strong business in Israel, where there were 4,000 venture-capital backed companies, many of which planned to stay private for a long time.
SecondMarket offers a trading arena for shares and financial products in private companies through which buyers and sellers operate directly. In the past two years, it has been a byword for selling shares in start-ups held by employees and investors, especially given the difficulties in holding IPOs on Wall Street.
Silbert founded SecondMarket in 2004. It mostly operates on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. The Israeli office was the company's first attempt to operate outside the US.
SecondMarket said in response, "Although we currently have no representative office in Israel, we continue to believe that Israel has interesting opportunities for our market for private companies."
2011 has been a stormy year for alternative markets. Early in the year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) asked several private markets for details about trading in certain companies. The SEC's interest followed US federal legislation, which stipulated that private companies with more than 500 shareholders should be subject to the transparency regulations applying to public companies.
In late October, SecondMarket raised $15 million at a company value of $200 million in its third financing round from The Social+Capital Partnership, a new venture fund established by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya. The financing brought the amount of capital raised by the company to $30 million. Most of the company's revenue comes from transactions fees amounting to a few percent of each deal carried out through it services.
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