The idea for P2P Shares didn’t start in a Silicon Valley incubator. It started on a random Tuesday evening when my phone rang. It was my dad.

He had a simple question: “How do I buy pre-IPO shares in SpaceX? Considering he paid for my business degree, I figured I owed him a solid answer. I jumped online, thinking I’d find a straightforward platform to point him toward. Instead, I fell down a rabbit hole of a highly fragmented, commission driven industry.

The Problem: A brokerage firm masked as a peer to peer marketplace

I spent hours  researching every major pre-IPO marketplace. What I discovered shocked me. These platforms market themselves as modern, open marketplaces, but underneath the slick dashboards, they operate as old-school, high-fee broker-dealers.

The most ironic part? The users were doing most of the work. Buyers and sellers were doing their own respective research, posting bids and offers, negotiating the price per share, and navigating the terms of the deal. Yet, the platforms were sweeping in at the finish line to extract massive, double-sided commissions.

I looked at the fee structures and realized they were regularly charging up to 5% to the buyer AND 5% to the seller. That is a staggering 10% total friction on a single private transaction.

There wasn’t a single platform that simply offered a listing service coupled with a built-in, secure, third-party escrow system to guarantee a safe closing. You either had to pay the exorbitant broker tax or risk getting scammed in the Wild West of unverified private sales.

Surely, there had to be a better way to buy and sell pre-IPO secondaries.

The Solution: An AI-native, zero commission marketplace

We  completely threw out the traditional business model of heavy headcount, heavier commissions. Instead, we operate as an autonomous enterprise that makes money by charging low technology escrow fees once a match is made This means if you are an accredited investor, you get to buy high-demand pre-IPO blocks with 0% commissions, and if you are a seller, you keep the cash you actually earned. By combining an easy, text-based chat room for direct peer negotiations with safe, automated escrow accounts handled by trusted bank partners, we make private equity trading fast, secure, and genuinely fair.