TurboTax for Private Fund Onboarding
Tim Flannery, co-founder of Passthrough, on building TurboTax for private fund investing
The bottleneck in private fund investing is not finding deals, it is getting legally and operationally cleared to send money. Today, once an LP decides to invest, the GP or its law firm emails over a subscription package, usually including the LPA and a long subscription document with accreditation, qualification, tax, and identity questions. The investor fills out forms by hand, sends documents back, waits for review, fixes mistakes, and repeats the cycle across the GP, counsel, admin team, and IR team, which can stretch into days or weeks.
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The core pain is that private fund onboarding is conditional and document heavy. Different investors see different eligibility questions based on domicile, entity type, and fund structure, so a single subscription can run 100 to 200 questions and produce multiple rounds of correction before acceptance.
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The market leaders are all trying to turn this manual intake into software. AngelList made fund formation and recurring LP commitments easier through products like Rolling Funds, while Carta and Juniper Square built broader fund administration stacks that include investor onboarding, reporting, and administration around the subscription workflow.
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What openness would change in practice is portability. Instead of retyping the same identity, tax, and qualification data for every new fund, platform, or SPV, investors could carry a reusable profile across managers and marketplaces, making private investing feel less like hiring a lawyer and more like opening a brokerage account.
The next phase is a private market stack where onboarding data, fund administration, and distribution are linked. As more investors come in through RIAs, evergreen vehicles, and online fund platforms, the winners will be the systems that make compliance invisible, let LP data move cleanly between products, and compress a fund commitment from a multi party paper chase into a short digital workflow.