Investing in Eightfold Stock | How to Buy Pre-IPO Shares (2025)

Eightfold is an enterprise hiring and talent management solutions provider. The company incorporates proprietary AI systems to enhance its operations and improve efficiency. Today, Eightfold's AI-powered hiring options help some of the largest names across industries connect the right talent with the right job.

AI hiring practices are more common than ever, and Eightfold is a dominant force in this sector. Consequently, there's a strong demand for the company to go public. Despite support from the institutional and private investment sectors, the company hasn’t shared any IPO plans. Thankfully, you can still acquire Eightfold pre-IPO shares. Here's what you need to know.

What is Eightfold?

California-based Eightfold entered the market in 2016. Notably, Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia founded the company to streamline the hiring process for large businesses. Today, Eightfold provides secure business intelligence and AI services to a variety of enterprise-level clientele.

The Eightfold AI model is unique in many aspects. According to company documentation, the model incorporates 1B career trajectories over 1M skills. As such, it can monitor, track, and recommend talent based on their accomplishments, talent, current skills, and other valuable insights.

Talent Intelligence Platform

Eightfold’s main product is the Talent Intelligence protocols. These tools improve hiring in various ways and can ensure the talent you have gets put to best use. The Talent Intelligence platform includes several helpful AI-powered features that help companies reduce their hiring costs and improve their overall quality of hires.

Hiring has become a tedious task for enterprise clientele. The sheer number of applications that a large business can receive is overwhelming. This flood of talent can mean that there are many occasions where the best person for the job doesn't get picked. This scenario can result from too many options flooding the process or from a time constraint preventing manual review of all of the applications.

AI solutions automate the processes that take the most time and deliver employers smart data that helps them make the right choice. Eightfold provides some of the most advanced automated AI hiring options available to the public. As such, it's secured a reputation as a top-performing competitor.

Eightfold Talent Acquisition

The Talent Acquisition features integrate deep learning AI to automate the interviewing and screening processes. Impressively, the system can scan the hiring pool, find noteworthy talent at a value, conduct interviews, and make hiring offers. Automating the talent acquisition process frees your business personnel up to focus on revenue-generating tasks.

Eightfold Talent Tracking

Another vital tool that Eightfold brings to the table is the Talent Tracking portal. This feature utilizes AI to provide deep insights into your current hires. You can scan enterprise, market, and internal data to find the perfect employee for the right position. This feature also makes it easy to identify when an employee demonstrates exemplary skills.

Eightfold Talent Management

The Talent Management feature helps companies determine the best role for internal positions, automating the determination process to ensure the best fit for your next internal position. It allows large businesses to monitor real-time employee data and skills. Also, it can help you retain your best employees by improving engagement via automated offers. From there, the system can automatically redeploy employees to weak points in their business model to improve results.

Marketplace

The marketplace is where Eightfold’s community meets to offer jobs, gigs, projects, and even mentorships. The marketplace operates as a secure location for the Eightfold community to share ideas and opportunities.

Workforce Exchange

Another core feature that makes Eightfold stand out is the Workforce Exchange. This unique option allows businesses to exchange talent to cut costs. For example, it can make recommendations based on the tasks you require, experience, or talent level you prefer.

Historical Funding Rounds

Summary of Eightfold Funding:

• Total Funding: Eightfold secured $410M across 5 funding rounds
• Largest Round: Eightfold's largest funding round secured $220M on June 10, 2021.
• Investors: A total of 9 institutional investors back Eightfold
• Latest Round: The latest funding round raised  $220M and was a Series E round held on June 10, 2021.

Funding Rounds Breakdown:

• 2 Early-Stage
• 3 Late-Stage

Key Investors:

Eightfold secured backing from several prominent institutional investors, including SoftBank Vision Fund, General Catalyst, Foundation Capital, IVP, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Capital One Ventures.

Funding data sourced from Tracxn

Why Invest in Eightfold?

Eightfold is a prominent name in the AI hiring sector, with major deployments across top-performing enterprise-level clientele. Currently, the company has operations globally, helping companies make explainable AI-powered data-driven recommendations.

Improve Employee Placement

It's common for large businesses to overlook or neglect in-house talent in search of new hires. Eightfold helps eliminate this issue by ensuring you're aware of your employee's talents and skills. It can also recommend learning and development opportunities to advance your employee's talents to the next level.

Partnerships

Another reason Eightfold makes sense for many investors is its strong strategic partnerships and clientele. The firm has an impressive client book that includes conglomerates like Bayer, Cloudflare, and Ubisoft. It even has agreements with the D.C. Department of Employment Services. These high-level partnerships demonstrate Eightfold's product stability and capabilities.

Smart AI Strategy

Eightfold's proprietary hiring AI models are another reason why investors seek out its stock. These systems are constantly updated to include vital data that improves the hiring process and ensures full compliance, security, and accessibility to users.

Proven Results

There is a lot of data supporting the benefits of using Eightfold within a certain business model. For example, Bayer, the pharmaceutical giant, listed a 90% reduction in screening time during the hiring process using Eightfold. Cloudflare, another popular business, has seen a 30% increase in sourcing productivity gains, alongside Vodafone, which listed a 50% decrease in hiring costs following its Eightfold integration.

How to Buy Eightfold Pre-IPO Shares

Eightfold remains a privately held company, so access to shares requires a specialized approach. Here is what you need to consider.

1. Pre-IPO Secondary Marketplace

Investors sometimes gain exposure to private companies through secondary marketplaces, which connect accredited investors with early shareholders—such as employees, venture firms, or insiders—looking to sell shares before a company’s IPO.

Pre-IPO investments offer the chance to invest during a company's high-growth phase, often at lower valuations than in the public markets. However, these opportunities come with important considerations:

• Eligibility: Secondary markets typically require you to be an accredited investor, meaning you must meet certain income or net worth thresholds.

• Liquidity Risk: Private shares are usually illiquid until the company goes public or is acquired, meaning you may need to hold them for several years—or potentially indefinitely.

If you meet the requirements and are comfortable with the risks, several platforms offer access to pre-IPO opportunities:

• Forge Global: One of the largest private stock marketplaces, offering shares in late-stage startups like SpaceX, Stripe, and Databricks. Minimums typically start around $100,000.

• EquityZen: A popular platform allowing accredited investors to buy into private companies with minimums as low as $5,000. Past offerings include companies like Discord and UiPath.

• Rainmaker Securities: A full-service broker that helps source and negotiate private share sales, including opportunities in companies like OpenAI, Stripe, and Palantir.

• Hiive: A newer platform with live bid/ask pricing for hundreds of private companies. Transparent and low-fee, with minimums starting around $25,000.

• MicroVentures: Offers pooled access to late-stage companies through special purpose vehicles (SPVs), including past investments in SpaceX and Instacart.

• EquityBee: Allows investors to fund employee stock option exercises at startups, often at discounted valuations, with minimums around $10,000.

• Augment: A digital-first marketplace showing real-time pricing for pre-IPO shares, targeting tech-savvy investors and offering lower transaction fees.

• StartEngine Private: Launched in late 2023, this platform offers accredited investors access to Regulation D offerings in later-stage, venture-backed companies. In its first nine months, it generated $16.5 million in revenue, with average investments around $32,000

Important: Always perform thorough due diligence and consult a financial advisor before investing in private company shares.

2. Private Equity Firms

Private equity firms gain access to pre-IPO shares during investment rounds. They then offer these shares to high-net-worth accredited investors with a commission. Notably, private equity firms are known to have extra stipulations, including blocking the sale of shares for years in some cases.

3. Employee Equity Sales

Many consider employee equity sales as the best way to acquire pre-IPO shares in Eightfold. This method of acquiring pre-IPO shares requires you to connect with former employees. It's common for companies to issue shares as part of an incentive package. Notably, this profit-sharing method has become more popular, leading to more pre-IPO share opportunities for investors.

Private Transactions: there are a lot of hoops you will need to jump through to complete a private pre-IPO transaction, including creating specific legal agreements, conducting valuations, and setting in place any limitations on the transfer of the asset.

Brokerage: Brokers will take a lot of the confusion out of the pre-IPO process. These professionals can guide you through each step, ensuring full compliance and avoiding common errors untrained professionals make.

There are several risks that you should consider before jumping into the pre-IPO shares investment arena. Here are the top concerns:

Liquidity Risk

If you are looking for an asset that you can sell right away, pre-IPO shares are not the best option. These investments can include sales and transfer clauses that prevent the transfer of the asset until certain criteria, such as the IPO's completion. It's even common for pre-IPO shares to require you to wait years before gaining the ability to sell your assets.

Regulatory Risk

The blockchain market has seen considerable scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers. While the technology is far better understood than in its early days, there are still many lawmakers who see it as a threat to the traditional financial system. As such, you need to always consider how new regulations could affect the value of your pre-IPO shares.

Market Risk

Purchasing pre-IPO shares in Eightfold means that you stand behind the project and its team.  The company has secured a reputation for excellence and has previously expressed a desire to go public. However, no concrete data has been provided yet. As such, it's vital to understand that the blockchain market is an active space that experiences strong fluctuations that could result in a different share value between now and any future IPO launch.

Valuation of Eightfold and Future IPO

Eightfold has a valuation is $2.1B. The company qualifies for Unicorn status with this revenue and is seen as a pioneering force in the market. Eightfold secured Unicorn status through its enterprise-focused strategies and efficient AI tools. All of these factors continue to drive hopes for an IPO. Still, the company hasn't shared any plans to host an IPO yet.

If Eightfold did host an IPO, there's lots of evidence suggesting that it could be a massive event. For one, the company is in the AI field, which is already a top performer for investors. Additionally, it’s a market leader with strong institutional ties, furthering its appeal. Those who can secure Eightfold shares could see exciting opportunities in the coming months.

Conclusion

Eightfold is a fast-moving AI solutions provider that has carved out a niche in the enterprise AI hiring sector. Investors who qualify for pre-IPO shares of Eightfold should be aware that the stipulations differ from traditional IPOs. In some instances, there are no sell and lock-up periods. Additionally, There's no guarantee that a company will operate in the same manner between the time of the IPO date and its public listing.

All of these factors mean that you need to be mindful of your investment's risks and rewards before making pre-IPO purchases. The best option is to consult a financial professional to ensure you remain within your acceptable risk level. Those who complete these tasks and qualify for Eightfold Pre-IPO shares could have a bright future.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice. Pre-IPO shares are typically available only to accredited investors and carry significant risk. Always perform thorough due diligence and consult a financial advisor or legal expert before making investment decisions.