The chair of HarbourVest Partners' secondaries investment committee told *Secondaries Investor* that transactions involving software assets are becoming harder to close, marking a reversal from the smooth flow of deals that characterized the secondaries market through most of 2023 and early 2024. The remarks signal pricing dislocation between sellers still anchoring to 2021 valuations and buyers pricing in SaaS multiple compression that has yet to fully clear private books.
HarbourVest manages $114 billion in private markets capital and runs one of the largest dedicated secondaries practices in the industry, completing roughly $4-5 billion in secondary volume annually. The firm's secondaries committee reviews every deal above $50 million, giving the chair direct visibility into pricing behavior across hundreds of LP portfolios. Software assets comprise an estimated 30-40% of venture-backed secondaries deal flow, concentrated in late-stage SaaS companies that raised at 15-25x ARR multiples in 2020-2021 and now face public market comparables trading at 4-7x.
The stall matters because secondaries volume is a leading indicator of forced price discovery in private markets. When LP liquidity needs ease—either through better portfolio distributions or slower capital calls—bid-ask spreads widen and transactions collapse. The same dynamic preceded the 2016 venture markdown cycle, when secondaries volume dropped 28% year-over-year before primary marks adjusted downward six quarters later. Software assets are particularly vulnerable because their public comparables have already repriced, creating a transparency problem that makes negotiations harder to bridge.
The pricing gap is structural, not cyclical. Software companies that raised at 20x ARR in 2021 are now generating flat or negative net revenue retention as enterprise buyers cut SaaS spend, but their cap tables still reflect hypergrowth assumptions. Secondaries buyers are underwriting terminal multiples of 6-8x ARR with 18-24 month liquidity horizons, while GP-led processes are still clearing at 10-12x by selectively showing only the strongest quarters of data. The spread collapses deals in diligence when buyers get full data room access and discover churn rates 200-300 basis points higher than marketing materials suggested.
Operators and allocators should watch three follow-on signals over the next 90-120 days: first, whether Lexington Partners and Coller Capital—the two largest secondaries buyers—pull back from software-heavy GP-led deals, which would force repricing across the entire late-stage SaaS complex; second, whether Tiger Global and Insight Partners, both overweight software at 50%+ of AUM, begin offering LP stakes at discounts wider than 25% to NAV, indicating capitulation; third, whether secondaries volume in Q2 2025 falls below $30 billion globally, which would mark the lowest quarterly figure since Q3 2020 and confirm that liquidity has frozen rather than simply slowed.
HarbourVest has not reduced its secondaries deployment pace, but the chair's public comments suggest the firm is finding better risk-adjusted opportunities outside software, likely in healthcare and industrials where private marks more closely track public comparables and exit timelines are shorter.