The financial technology startup has raised $130 million offering software to private investors.
Venture capitalists are betting on a product that’s close to their hearts: software for venture capitalists. Juniper Square Inc., a software provider for VCs and other private investors, has raised $130 million in a deal that values the company at $1.1 billion.
The new funding round, which the company plans to announce Monday, was led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from Fifth Wall, Redpoint Ventures and others. The cash infusion will go toward expansion, and building out the startup’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
Juniper Square’s software helps VC, private equity and real estate investors keep tabs on their investments, and can be used for other tasks like fundraising, administration, compliance and data analysis. The company says it counts major firms as customers — including Felicis Ventures and Greystar — with more than 600,000 limited partner clients, and 2,000 general partners. The company said about $1 trillion dollars in equity is managed using its platforms.
The funding comes as the private markets have grown in both size and importance. Some of the country’s most prominent startups have chosen to stay private longer (see: Stripe Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp.), as more money flows into secondary share sales and other investments. Juniper and its investors believe that growth represents an opportunity.
Private assets are a “really big market” with an “unsolved problem,” said Nick Shalek, a general partner at Ribbit Capital, who is both a client and investor in Juniper Square. Shalek said he thinks the startup is “the best positioned company to be the trusted AI partner to alternative asset managers.”
With the new funds, Juniper Square is launching JunieAI, a service that offers AI agents, essentially AI programs that can perform more tasks autonomously, to help make its tools more efficient. Juniper Square says it will also be using AI to help users tap into more data from emails and documents.
Alex Robinson, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said in an interview with Bloomberg that private assets are already a large market and he expects continued growth with the “rise of the retail investor” making private bets. He sees an opportunity for expansion beyond institutional clients with the individual investor set. He predicts that “the private markets are going to see more inflows of capital than the public markets will, and that’s going to cause the industry to grow.”
Written by: Katie Roof @Bloomberg
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