One vehicle, many sellers, a single institutional sale.
This page walks through the process from your side of the table: what you contribute, what you receive, where general partner consent fits, and how the sale is run. The finer mechanics — valuation, documentation, sequencing — are best explained in person, applied to your actual position, and that is exactly what the first conversation is for.
Sellers contribute in. One buyer takes the whole out.
1. Pooling: why your position joins others
Taken alone, most individual fund interests are difficult to sell. The position is small by institutional standards, and buyers who do engage with one-off positions know the seller has few alternatives — and price accordingly.
Vellum's answer is scale. Your position is pooled with comparable interests from other sellers into a single vehicle; nothing about the underlying funds changes. What changes is what is offered for sale: a block of institutional size, which clears the minimum thresholds of serious secondary buyers and gives them a reason to compete for it.
2. Your share: how your economics are protected
When you contribute a position to the vehicle, you do not simply hand it over. You receive an interest in the vehicle in proportion to the agreed value of what you contributed. If your position represents twelve percent of the vehicle's value at formation, you receive twelve percent of net sale proceeds at closing.
Relative values are set under a single documented framework, applied identically to every contributor — and every contributor sees the same methodology in writing before committing. You are never asked to accept a number derived differently from your neighbor's. We walk through the framework, and how it applies to your specific position, at the start of an engagement rather than the end.
- Contributions are recorded position by position, with the valuation basis stated in writing.
- Every seller holds a strictly proportionate claim on proceeds — no preferences, no side arrangements.
- Until the sale closes, the underlying interests remain what they were: stakes in the same funds, with the same reporting.
3. GP consent: the gate every transfer passes through
Nearly every private fund's governing documents restrict transfers. Moving an interest — into the vehicle, and ultimately to a buyer — requires the consent of the fund's general partner. This is not a formality, no credible process can route around it, and we treat it as a central workstream rather than an afterthought.
What it means for you is simple: we manage the entire consent process on your behalf. You will not be negotiating with the fund yourself, and you will know where each consent stands as the transaction progresses. Where a GP declines consent for a particular position, that position does not transfer — we tell you promptly, and it costs you nothing to have tried.
Worth knowing: consent timelines are the least predictable part of any secondary transaction. GPs respond in weeks in the best cases and quarters in the worst. We give you a realistic range at the outset, not the best case.
4. The sale: one block, several bidders, a documented price
Once the vehicle is assembled and consents are in progress, we take the combined position to market. The buyer universe is institutional: dedicated secondary funds, hedge funds with secondary strategies, and liquidity solutions platforms. We run a structured process in which multiple qualified buyers bid against one another — not a negotiation with whoever showed up first.
Competition is the entire point. The difference between the price a lone seller negotiates with a single buyer and the price a competitive process produces is, in our experience, the most reliable source of value in the secondary market. At closing, proceeds are distributed to sellers in proportion to what each contributed, and you receive a full account of the process: who was approached, who bid, and how the final price was reached.
What this process does not do
It does not recover net asset value — secondary sales price at a discount, and the size of that discount depends on the fund, its maturity, and market conditions. It does not move faster than GP consent allows. And it does not suit every position: some interests are too encumbered, too concentrated, or too early in a fund's life to sell sensibly. When that is our view, we say so at the first conversation rather than the last.
Have a position you're weighing?
Describe it in a few sentences. We will tell you candidly whether it is saleable, roughly what the process would involve, and what a realistic outcome looks like.