Going public is a maze.
We are the conductor.
Five paths to a public market, dozens of filings, a cast of counsel, auditors, agents, and market makers, and a rulebook under all of it. Market Fortress maps your route, prepares the disclosures, assembles the team, and drives the timeline. You own the company. We conduct the process.
Most companies walk the maze blind.
No one holds the whole map.
Counsel handles the documents. The auditor handles the financials. A transfer agent, a market maker, a CUSIP, a DTC participant each handle their slice. Every one is a separate engagement, billed by the hour, and not one of them is responsible for the sequence, the deadlines, or the deal as a whole. The company is left to hold the map it has never seen before.
The wrong path is expensive.
There are several ways to go public, and they are not interchangeable. The right one depends on your size, your capital need, your timeline, and your appetite for disclosure. Choosing wrong, or sequencing a path badly, costs months and hundreds of thousands of dollars before anyone notices the turn was taken too early.
Five paths to a public market. We map you to the right one.
A short diagnostic grades your readiness and ranks the routes for your situation, with the trade-offs of each named plainly. The path is a recommendation you and your counsel confirm, not a product we push.
Reverse merger
Combine into an existing public company. The fastest route to a public quote when a clean vehicle is available, and the one with the most diligence to do before you sign.
Regulation A+
Raise up to 75 million dollars from the public in a twelve-month period under a qualified offering circular, then quote. A registered-light path built for emerging companies.
S-1 registered IPO
The traditional registered offering. The most rigorous path, the deepest disclosure, and the widest access to public capital.
Direct listing
List existing shares on a market without raising new capital. For companies that already have the capital and want the public market.
Uplist or de-SPAC
Move from OTC to a national exchange, or complete a de-SPAC combination. The graduation step, with exchange-grade governance to stand up.
Your situation may call for a route not listed here. The diagnostic surfaces it, and the consultation confirms it.
We do not hand you a checklist. We conduct the process.
The roadmap
Every step of your chosen path, in order, with prerequisites enforced and an owner on each one. Not a static checklist; a live map that unlocks the next move as each one closes.
The form factory
Your Rule 15c2-11 current information and the broker package, generated from your own data rather than a blank template. The disclosures that get a company quoted, assembled and kept current.
The team
The full cast your path requires: securities counsel, a PCAOB auditor, a transfer agent, a market maker or OTC Markets, a DTC participant. We tell you who you need and when, and draft the first contact for you to send.
The economics
The real cost and the real timeline for your path, broken into line items, with the critical path that shows which steps run in parallel and where the months actually go.
The path to a public quote, demystified.
A public quote starts with Rule 15c2-11 current information. Getting it published used to mean finding the one market maker who would sponsor a Form 211. Since the 2021 amendments, there are two routes, and we run whichever fits.
OTC Markets, directly
As a qualified inter-dealer quotation system, OTC Markets can review your current information itself and coordinate with FINRA, with no sponsoring market maker in the middle. For many issuers this is the simpler door, and we prepare the package it reviews.
A market maker files the 211
The traditional route: a registered market maker files a Form 211 with FINRA on your behalf. We prepare your half of it and tell you which firms sponsor quotations. We never pay a market maker for a quotation, which Rule 5250 forbids, and we never promise one, which the broker controls.
We are your conductor, not your broker.
Flat fee, always
We charge a flat fee for the software and the project management. We never take equity in your company, never charge a success fee, and never take a cut of a raise. Our incentives do not turn on your deal closing a particular way.
You own the vehicle
In a reverse merger, you acquire and control the public company. Market Fortress never takes title to a public shell, never brokers one, and never sells one. Counsel papers the transaction; we drive the compliance and the timeline.
The lines that protect you
Market Fortress is software and compliance services, not a broker-dealer, an investment adviser, or your counsel. We do not solicit investors, place securities, or give legal advice. We prepare and project-manage; your counsel files and opines; the market decides.
Going public is the on-ramp. The platform is the road.
One certified record, from day one
Every document the journey produces lands in the certified Vault, the single source of truth the rest of the platform reads from. The going-public package is not a folder of one-off files; it is the first chapter of your permanent corporate record.
The day after the bell is harder than the day of
Going public starts the clock on periodic reports, material-event disclosures, and insider filings. The same platform that conducts your ascent runs that machinery the moment you are quoted, so the on-ramp hands off to the road without a seam.
Plan your ascent.
Every engagement is scoped to your path and quoted directly. Tell us where you are and where you want to be, and we will lay out the route, the team, and the timeline.