California's economy is the largest in the country and the fourth-largest on earth, yet its companies still raise capital across fragmented, opaque venues - public equities on one system, private shares in manual back rooms, and digital assets with no consistent rulebook. The result is thin liquidity, slow settlement, uneven investor protection, and listing costs that lock out smaller issuers. We start with California because the gap is widest here. The venue we are building is a U.S.-regulated exchange: national in scope, and - as at every established U.S. venue - open to foreign issuers under the same rulebook and to investors from anywhere.

California Stock Exchange is being built to bring those markets together - from a Series A startup to a public giant - on one transparent, regulated venue. We will match orders on a lit order book, clear and manage risk, and settle trades with finality; every settlement captured in a secure, independently verifiable record that members, issuers, investors, and regulators can check for themselves. The output isn't a delayed report. It's a verifiable settlement certificate the whole market can trust. And because we intend to keep listing costs low and the regulatory path streamlined, we open public capital to small-cap, high-growth companies that traditional exchanges leave behind.

The problem is documented, not asserted. The number of U.S. publicly listed companies is down roughly half from its ~7,500 peak in 1996, and most of that decline is attributed to the growth of private capital rather than to regulation.¹ Companies now stay private a median of about 13 years, with $94.9 billion of U.S. venture secondaries trading in 2025 outside any transparent venue.² Meanwhile price discovery is migrating off the lit quote - single-dealer platforms have roughly doubled to about 6% of U.S. equity trading³ - and the SEC has itself named fragmentation, complexity, and cost as harms of the current framework.⁴

Two things follow, and we would rather state both. The first is that cheaper listing alone is not the answer: cost is real, but it explains only about 7.3% of the IPO decline.¹ Our position is cost plus distribution into California's issuer base plus a continuum from private shares to a public listing on one rulebook. The second is that we are pre-licensing: we hold no broker-dealer registration, no Regulation ATS authorization, and no exchange registration, and everything described here is what we are building rather than what we are running.

Sources. ¹ Columbia Business School, "Fewer Companies Are Going Public. Are Regulations Driving the Drop?" ² PitchBook–NVCA Venture Monitor (2025); VanEck, "Companies Are Staying Private Longer." ³ Rosenblatt Securities, reported in John Lothian News, May 15, 2026. ⁴ U.S. SEC Release No. 34-105655, Jun 11, 2026 — proposed, not final.