Treating Nonpaying Operators Like Customers
Tim Flannery, co-founder of Passthrough, on building TurboTax for private fund investing
Passthrough is building a multi sided workflow product where the non paying operators can become the real distribution engine. Fund admins and law firms are the people who clean up broken subscription packets, chase missing fields, and rekey investor data into their own systems, so making their work easier reduces errors at the exact point where fund closings stall. That is how a GP paid onboarding tool turns into infrastructure that service providers recommend and pull into more deals.
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The product is designed around existing legal documents, not around forcing a new standard. Passthrough takes a fund's own subscription docs and turns them into a guided workflow, which lets investors answer only relevant questions while producing data fund admins and lawyers can ingest in the format they already use.
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This mirrors a proven pattern in private markets software. Carta found adjacent service providers around the cap table became advocates, and built fund admin into a major business. The common lesson is that software wins faster when it removes the most tedious work for lawyers and administrators instead of trying to displace them.
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The broader market is large because private fund operations are still unusually manual. AngelList monetizes fund managers through admin fees and carry, while Juniper Square bundles software with embedded fund administration teams. Passthrough is taking a narrower wedge, investor onboarding, and using that wedge to sit upstream of those service heavy workflows.
The next step is for onboarding data to become a reusable identity layer across private markets. If Passthrough keeps becoming the easiest place for investors, fund admins, and law firms to complete fund closings, it can expand from one time subscription workflows into recurring compliance, tax, and reporting infrastructure that more platforms plug into.