Today, we announced the latest addition to the Carta product suite: LP Portfolio Analytics, built for institutional capital allocators to manage their alternative asset data and portfolios. This comes through our acquisition of Accelex, the software provider for capital allocators and institutional LPs, and marks our first product specifically built for LPs.
This feels long overdue.
Seven years ago I drew this network graph in our Series D pitch deck outlining the different nodes of Carta’s network. At that time, 90% of our business still came from companies, and we were just starting to expand to servicing GPs. But we knew that as we scaled the fund admin business, LPs would be the next node of the network that we would need to unlock.
LPs are critical to the success of the private capital economy. Led by the pioneering work of legends like the late, great David Swensen, large asset allocators from large-scale funds of funds to endowments to foreign sovereign wealth funds have all significantly increased their exposure to alternatives over the past two decades. It’s no coincidence that we’ve seen the largest alternatives boom over that same period of time. LPs are the consistent heartbeat that keeps the innovation economy alive and thriving.
Despite that, I’ll be the first to admit that we haven’t made LPs a first-order citizen within the Carta platform. While we have the best fund admin investor portal on the market, we don’t capture the full picture of an LP’s alternative portfolio. Unfortunately, that piece of their puzzle, like many workflows in private capital, is stuck in a hellish mixture of spreadsheets, documents, and antiquated portals that make digesting and normalizing data a cumbersome process.
This will change with our acquisition of Accelex. Accelex has built a remarkable business by solving the most difficult portfolio management and analytics problems for some of the largest institutional LPs in the world. Their ability to configure data flow across multiple sources, extract and normalize key fund information, and surface underlying asset performance and risk analysis draws rave reviews from their customers and partners, and I couldn’t be more excited to bring Accelex’s suite of products to the more than 125,000 LPs that are on Carta today. Additionally, I am thrilled to welcome Franck, Michael, and the rest of the outstanding Accelex team into the Carta family.
This acquisition marks a key moment in our journey at Carta. Over the past couple of years, I’ve talked a lot about our desire to build a networked ERP for private capital. Accelex doesn’t complete the picture for our vision of the future (we have a LOT more coming), but I think this now makes us the only company in private capital that serves portfolio companies, GPs, and LPs alike.
The next decade of alternatives will be defined by those who can automate workflows and streamline reporting across the entirety of the private capital stack. I firmly believe that Carta is best positioned to win this market.
