SecondMarket raises $15M at $200 million valuation

Chamath Palihapitiya's Social+Capital Partnership bets on booming alternative-investment marketplace

(Correction: To reflect the valuation.) 

SecondMarket is busy making news these days. Just one month after holding its own liquidity event on its marketplace, SecondMarket announced Wednesday that it's raising $15 million in a Series C round of funding from The Social+Capital Partnership, founded by well-respected former Facebook executive-turned-VC Chamath Palihapitiya, who will become a board member at SecondMarket.

The valuation is $200 million, the company told us. That's a slightly higher valuation that Chamath originally invested at in late September, when his fund and prolific investor Yuri Milner were investors in a company-wide liquidity event that helped SecondMarket employees liquidate $13 million worth of stock. Ashton Kutcher was another investor in that round.  

NY-based SecondMarket plans to use the funds to expand into new asset classes, and make acquisitions.

(Note: Barry Silbert, SecondMarket founder and CEO, will be speaking at Venture Shift NY this November 17. Hear directly from Barry about how SecondMarket is changing investment opportunities, particularly in private companies. Get your tickets here.)

SecondMarket has certainly been active of late as it ventures into different types of transactions. It now appears that the company may be part of a syndicate of bankers helping to sell Groupon's $11 billion IPO. That's nice additional revenue for them right there. Additionally, the company's private-company trading platform continues to gain momentum. Just last week, SecondMarket released data showing that its private company transactions jumped 75% to $435 million, in the first nine months of this year.

Fueling that activity is interest from asset managers and wealthy individuals interested in consumer Internet and social media companies, like Facebook, Zynga, Twitter and Foursquare, to name a few. 

(Image source: Flickr)

(Full disclosure: Barry Silbert, CEO and founder of SecondMarket, is an investor in Vator)