Passthrough as Plaid for Private Markets
Tim Flannery, co-founder of Passthrough, on building TurboTax for private fund investing
The Plaid comparison only works if Passthrough becomes the system that other private market platforms trust for investor identity and onboarding data. Its wedge is the subscription workflow itself, where investors already answer 100 to 200 qualification questions, and where law firms, fund admins, and wealth platforms all need the same cleaned, reusable data. If that data can travel across Carta, AngelList, iCapital, and RIAs, Passthrough stops being a form tool and becomes infrastructure.
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Plaid gets paid when apps pull bank account data through its pipes. Passthrough is aiming for a similar toll booth position around investor identity, accreditation, KYC, tax, and subscription data, with the user granting permission and downstream providers paying for access.
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This is valuable because private fund onboarding is still operationally heavy. Investors fill out long documents, law firms kick back errors, and fund admins rekey messy data into their own systems. A shared identity layer removes repeated manual work every time the same investor joins another fund or platform.
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The market structure supports this if Passthrough stays neutral. AngelList, Carta, Juniper Square, Anduin, wealth managers, and fund admins each control part of the workflow, but none naturally owns a portable cross-platform investor profile. That leaves room for an API layer that plugs into all of them.
The next step is a private markets login that carries verified identity, compliance, and tax data wherever an investor goes. If Passthrough can turn a painful, one off fund close into a reusable profile accepted across platforms, it can expand from software sold to fund managers into usage based infrastructure sold across the whole private capital stack.