API plumbing for private fund onboarding
Tim Flannery, co-founder of Passthrough, on building TurboTax for private fund investing
Calling Passthrough an API business means it is trying to become plumbing, not another destination website. The product does the messy work that private wealth platforms, CRMs, fund admins, and investor portals do not want to build themselves, turning subscription docs, KYC and AML checks, tax forms, and investor data handoffs into reusable workflows that can sit inside someone else’s branded experience.
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The workflow is painful enough to support infrastructure economics. Private fund subscriptions can involve 100 to 200 questions, back and forth revisions, law firms, admins, and compliance teams. Passthrough’s wedge is digitizing that process and reusing investor data across funds, which makes an API layer valuable because the same profile can power many downstream steps.
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The buyers who benefit most often want white labeled software, not a competing frontend. In wealth and alternatives distribution, firms like iCapital and large wirehouses care deeply about owning branding, emails, portals, and client relationships, while the hard work underneath is data validation, document routing, reconciliations, and integrations across many systems.
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Recent product moves show the model in practice. Passthrough has positioned itself as API first and embeddable, added integrations with systems like DealCloud, Ontra, Salesforce, Dynamo, and eFront, and describes itself as infrastructure that connects to CRMs, investor portals, and fund admin systems rather than replacing them.
This points toward a market where private fund onboarding looks less like bespoke legal ops and more like shared infrastructure. The winners should be the companies that can embed deeply across the stack, own the clean investor record, and make every new fund close, compliance check, and reporting workflow cheaper and faster for the platforms on top.