Company Ownership vs LP Networks
Tim Flannery, co-founder of Passthrough, on building TurboTax for private fund investing
This distinction explains why Passthrough is not just a lighter version of cap table software, it is built around the fund manager as the central operator rather than the company. In a cap table system, the record is who owns the company and on what terms. In Passthrough’s world, the record is each LP, their subscription documents, KYC and AML checks, side letter obligations, and the status of dozens of onboarding steps that change by fund, vehicle, and jurisdiction.
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Carta started from digitizing stock certificates and cap tables for startups, then expanded into valuations, liquidity, and fund admin. The core data model still begins with a company and its ownership graph. That is why closing an equity round can feel like a term negotiation plus signatures, while private fund onboarding turns into a long compliance and document workflow.
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Passthrough is optimized for the LP relationship layer. Its product centers on electronic subscription documents, investor verification, financial crime compliance, and integrations into systems like Salesforce, eFront, and Ontra. In practice, that means a GP can invite an investor, prefill forms, run checks, collect executed docs, and push the data into downstream admin and compliance systems.
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The related part is that these networks increasingly connect. Juniper Square positions its platform around fundraising, investor onboarding, investor relations, and fund administration for GPs, while Carta has added fund administration on top of company ownership data. The market is converging toward linked systems where issuer records, fund records, and investor records can move together without rekeying everything by hand.
The next phase is a shared private markets data layer where the company cap table, the fund vehicle, and the LP record stop living in separate silos. The winners will be the platforms that turn messy subscription, compliance, and reporting work into one continuous workflow, and then become the system every GP, admin, and service provider builds around.