Figure Technologies Inc., the startup co-founded by Mike Cagney, created a platform to help private companies raise and trade equity using its blockchain technology.

Figure Equity Solutions has already helped manage, raise and trade more than $4.7 billion in equity, the company said Wednesday in a statement. The business has done two secondaries now with a “relatively robust” amount of institutional participation, Cagney said in a phone interview.

Cagney, who previously founded Social Finance Inc., has spent the last few years building Figure into a business with offerings such as home equity lines of credit and payment services. The company struck a deal in August to buy mortgage lender Homebridge Financial Services Inc. and a month earlier announced a partnership with Apollo Global Management Inc. on projects such as using blockchain for fund listings and asset securitization. With the new platform, Figure is aiming to streamline the process of raising and managing equity.

“We’re saying, ‘Look, let’s get these private companies on and allow them to much more efficiently raise primary capital, create secondary liquidity, not have the whole paper certification process and all the issues,’” Cagney said. “The idea is you let the company turn on and off secondary liquidity as they want and as we drive more and more of these, you’ll create more and more institutional capital into this ecosystem.”

Ultimately, Cagney plans to develop the platform out for businesses that are trying to go public. Figure aims to demonstrate that it can work efficiently with private companies first and then evolve, he said.

–By Katherine Chiglinsky (Bloomberg Mercury)