Public market investors have a large variety of infrastructure and software that helps them keep track of, analyze and manage their investments, but that’s not the case for investors in private companies, such as venture capitalists. Indeed, a lot of private market investors have to manage and upload information about their investments into a plethora of back-office systems, and a lot of times they have to do it manually.
There are a few platforms that make the task easy, though — Apax, Vistra, IQEQ, and Carta, in particular, dominate the investment management space.
A newer player, bunch, based out of Berlin, wants to make it easy for investors to manage their investments, administrate and transact within the private markets, and it has now raised $15.5 million in a Series A round to continue building its platform. The startup has now raised a total of $22 million to date, and claims that private funds currently manage some €2 billion worth of assets through its platform.
The Series A round was led by FinTech Collective.
With the IPO window more or less closed for the last couple of years, private markets have grown by default as investors look for liquidity and opportunities to sell or buy shares in hot startups. As we saw in March, in the absence of IPOs, investors have increasingly been turning to secondary marketplaces where private companies can authorize their shareholders to sell a limited amount of stock to approved investors. Transactions on secondary markets rose from $35 billion in 2017 to $105 billion in 2021 and are expected to total $138 billion in 2023, when year-end tallies are available, according to data from Industry Ventures.
And, the alternative asset market is expected to be worth nearly $40 trillion by the end of the decade, with the private markets data sector expected to be worth $18 billion by 2030.
However, much of the private investment industry is run on relatively older platforms.
Founded in late 2021 by Levent Altunel and Enrico Ohnemüller, bunch is aimed at venture capital and private equity investors. The platform lets investors store private market data points, access to up-to-date information, automate workflows, and run pre- and post-close services.
Over a call, Levent Altunel told TechCrunch: “Right now, VCs operate almost like bookkeepers and accountants, doing stuff manually like transferring data in and out of Excel or PDFs. We automate and digitize that experience in a workflow that essentially reduces the errors that you can make and reduces the man-hours it takes. This frees up fund managers to concentrate on raising funds or actually investing.”
“In an industry that looks a lot like the public markets did in the 1980s, bunch is changing the game for private markets GPs and LPs,” said Toby Triebel, a partner at FinTech Collective, in a statement.
Existing investors Cherry Ventures, Motive Ventures, Broadhaven Ventures and TinyVC, a firm by AngelList’s former Europe head, Philipp Moehring, participated in the round. Angel investors including founders and executives from Klarna, Moonfare and Kinnevik also invested.
