Velvet as Private Market Infrastructure
Velvet
The real upside is not selling one more AI seat to investors, it is becoming the system that stores, structures, and serves hard to access private market data wherever professionals already work. Velvet already ingests decks, data rooms, CRM records, emails, legal docs, and market data into a private knowledge base for daily diligence workflows. If that layer becomes queryable through APIs, the product stops being just a memo tool and starts looking more like underlying plumbing for many adjacent firms.
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The same core workflow already resembles infrastructure. Velvet organizes scattered private market information, fills CRM fields, extracts terms from legal docs and spreadsheets, and creates a persistent knowledge base inside each customer environment. That is the raw material an API business needs.
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There is precedent for document systems expanding past one core buyer into broader professional services. iManage now serves more than 4,000 customers and 430,000 users across legal, accounting, financial institutions, and corporate teams. DeepJudge is pursuing the same pattern by building on top of iManage installed bases beyond law firms.
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Private market data can also become strategically valuable to institutions, not just end users. JPMorgan bought Aumni to get first party venture documents and ownership data, and Velvet is pursuing a wider version of that asset by capturing legal, financial, workflow, and behavioral data across deal evaluation.
The next step is a stack where diligence, portfolio reporting, co investment matching, and secondary liquidity all run on the same private data layer. If Velvet gets there first, it can sit underneath funds, advisors, law firms, and other professional services teams as the private market system of record, with software revenue on top and transaction revenue flowing through it.