Doc 06 — Pitch
The deck, and the answers behind it.
The twelve-slide deck is embedded below. Beneath it is the two-minute Q&A prep — the questions a secondaries-literate investor asks, in the order they ask them, led by the one that usually kills marketplace pitches: the cold start.
The deck
Two-minute Q&A prep
Lead with the cold-start answer — it is the reflexive objection to anything that sounds like a marketplace, and Continuum simply does not have the problem. Then moat, competition, market, the platform vision, and the regulatory line.
How do you solve the cold-start problem?
We don't have one. Continuum is not a two-sided marketplace — there is no liquidity to seed and no chicken-and-egg between buyers and sellers. Each close is a discrete deal a GP is already organizing: the participants are known, the timeline is set, and the only question is whether settlement runs on spreadsheets and law firms or on Continuum.
And it's asymmetric in our favour: secondary dry powder is at a record ~$300B+ while deals are the scarce side, so the deal arrives first and capital follows. We sell into existing deal flow through a fund-administrator channel — one admin is a book of GP relationships — then buyers cleared on deal #1 are reused across deals, a network effect that compounds rather than a network we must bootstrap.
What stops someone copying this?
The moat is Canton-native and compounds. Atomic multilateral settlement and sub-transaction privacy are the same primitive — the settlement guarantee and the privacy guarantee come together, not bolted on. On top sit the regulator fairness window (need-to-know disclosure, not anonymity), fund-admin distribution that owns the GP relationships, and switching costs once Continuum is the system of record for closes.
Who do you compete with?
The incumbents run this workflow off-chain — Coller, Pantheon, and Citco coordinate continuation closes in spreadsheets and law firms. None settle atomically, and none can prove fairness without leaking the book.
The two on-chain neighbours don't do the close. iCapital's Canton DLT is a pre-trade data layer — no settlement, no secondaries. Nasdaq Fund Secondaries runs a reusable-buyer workflow, but off-chain and non-atomic. Our moat is the one thing neither does: the confidential, atomic multilateral close.
Isn't the market too small?
We price the revenue pool, never the notional. The continuation wedge is a $30–70M/yr TAM — per-close fees ($75–250k) across rising deal frequency plus buyer-side SaaS — a real, fundable business on its own. The venture-scale story is the reusable-participant network (repeat usage and switching costs) plus the platform: the same rail extends to synthetic risk transfer — an IMF-named systemic whitespace at a $100–125M TAM — then confidential elections and private credit.
| Comparable | What it is | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Versana | Consortium utility across $9T of loans | $125M+ |
| OSTTRA → KKR | Post-trade infrastructure | $3.1B |
| Securitize | Tokenized-asset infrastructure · 15–50bps | $1.25B |
Where does this go?
Continuum is the Confidential Settlement Layer for private markets — a regulated-infrastructure utility in the shape institutions already fund and acquire. Continuation today; a reusable participant rail; SRT, Election, and private credit next. The wedge is the tip of the spear; the layer is the company.
If buyers are reusable, aren't you a fund or a broker-dealer?
No — because we reuse the participant, never the capital. Continuum never pools, custodies, or pre-commits buyer money, never charges a fee tied to a deal's size, and only ever coordinates accredited parties' own bilateral commitments into one atomic close. That keeps us a settlement rail — not a pooled vehicle (Investment Company Act), an adviser, or a broker-dealer / ATS. Capital always funds from each buyer's own balance sheet. The line we never cross is the word capital.
“Privacy must be need-to-know, not anonymity.”— Yuval Rooz, CEO, Digital Asset · the regulator must be able to see
The one-line close
Continuum collapses a multi-week continuation close into one private, atomic transaction the regulator can see — and turns that into the settlement layer for private markets.