First Party Data Powers Private Markets

The real asset in deals like Aumni is not software revenue, it is proprietary market exhaust. Aumni sat inside the document flow of venture firms and turned cap tables, SAFE notes, side letters, and financing docs into structured records, which gave J.P. Morgan a direct feed of how private deals are actually priced, negotiated, and managed. Velvet is aiming at the same prize, but with a wider data surface that includes documents, workflows, and investor behavior.

• Aumni was acquired by J.P. Morgan in March 2023 to strengthen its private markets product set. That fit matters because banks already have distribution, capital, and institutional clients. What they often lack is clean, live data from inside private market workflows.
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• The valuable part of first party data is that it is created during real work. A fund uploads a deck, reviews a data room, marks up legal terms, writes an investment memo, and tracks a decision. That produces higher signal than scraped company profiles or stale database entries.
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• Velvet is extending the Aumni model from document intelligence into decision intelligence. Instead of only reading signed legal paperwork after a deal is done, it also captures how investors source, evaluate, and route deals, which can later support co-investments, liquidity matching, and institutional access.
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This points toward private markets platforms being bought and built less like point software, and more like data infrastructure. The winners will be the systems investors use every day, because daily workflow is what produces the proprietary dataset that can power underwriting, market maps, and eventually private market distribution.