TurboTax for Private Fund Investing
Tim Flannery, co-founder of Passthrough, on building TurboTax for private fund investing
The real bottleneck in private fund distribution is not investor demand, it is the paperwork layer between interest and money movement. In practice, a fund manager can win the relationship and still lose the capital if the investor gets trapped in a slow loop of PDFs, missing fields, legal review, and identity checks. Products that turn onboarding into a stored profile plus guided workflow make private funds behave more like ecommerce, which expands conversion as much as it saves admin time.
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The old workflow is painfully manual. Subscription packets can run 100 to 200 questions, get emailed around, come back with errors, and bounce between investor, law firm, compliance, and admin for days or weeks. That friction delays closes and directly causes some investors to walk away.
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The wedge is reusable investor identity. Passthrough built around guided sub docs and embedded KYC and AML, while iCapital and Juniper Square also pre populate investor data and route digital subscriptions through a single system. The common pattern is saving investor information once, then reusing it across future investments.
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Lower friction opens the market down channel. iCapital grew by helping wirehouses and RIAs place many small investors into alternatives through feeder funds and digital onboarding, while Juniper Square scaled onboarding across 1,200 plus GPs and 300,000 plus subscriptions. Simpler workflows let managers serve investors who were previously too operationally expensive.
The next step is private markets moving from one off document handling to a persistent identity and transaction rail. As more onboarding data, compliance checks, and fund workflows become reusable across platforms, private investing gets closer to a one click experience, which should widen participation and push more of the market toward infrastructure providers that own the investor profile and workflow layer.