E169: How to Build an Enduring Private Equity Franchise w/Alex Robinson

Alex Robinson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Juniper Square, a company transforming the private markets through technology and service. In this episode, we go deep into how he and his co-founders saw the opportunity to modernize fund administration, why the private markets are decades behind the public markets, and how Juniper Square is building for the future with AI agents. We also discuss how the best GPs scale trust with LPs, why the retail channel still hasn’t arrived in full force, and the challenges of building a system of record in a fragmented industry.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Weisburd?

  What have been the best practices in terms of GPs that have been able to scale their trusted relationships with LPs and build real platform?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  They care very deeply about how their investments are portrayed, about the quality of information they're getting to LPs, about the frequency, about the timeliness, because they believe that this represents their brand and it represents part of the trust building that they're in the business of conveying.

• 0:29David Weisburd?

  Today, I'm excited to welcome Alex Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Juniper Square, the leading investment management platform for the private funds industry. Alex is a serial entrepreneur who has raised over $100 million to transform how real estate and private equity firms raise, manage, and report capital, as well as, most critically, build lasting relationships with LPs. We'll explore his journey from Microsoft to building Juniper Square, his vision for digitizing private markets, and how he's driving innovation to one of the world's largest markets. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Alex. Tell me about how you started Juniper Square over a decade ago.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  It was my third startup. So I'd learned what... I'd made some mistakes with the first two, which were in the clean tech field, and I'd made a little bit of money from my second startup. And so the genesis for Juniper Square was my experience as an LP, investing into private funds. I did a direct real estate deal and they sent a FedEx truck to my house with a stack of paperwork two inches thick. I invested in a real estate fund, same story. Truck coming to my house with paper. I invested in a venture fund, same story. And I just was shocked that in 2013, summer of 2013, I could trade stocks online, I could do my healthcare online, I could buy shoes online.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  The whole world had moved to cloud and had moved to digital, except for the private markets industry, which was still shuffling paper around on vans and trucks. And it just seemed to me that it sounded like the industry was two or three years behind. It was like 20 years behind where the public markets were. And what was clear to me at that point was the private markets were going to come to look like the public markets. They were going to be, they were going to be efficient like the public markets. There was going to be the same degree of transparency, same degree of liquidity. And you were going to be able to execute these complex trades, you know, investing into a private markets fund, a venture fund, private equity fund, real estate fund, et cetera, by clicking buttons in a web browser, just like you could do in the public markets.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  And the genesis for Juniper Square was really me and my co-founders, Adam Ginsberg and Jonas Fahey, becoming fascinated with this question of how would you go about making that transformation of the private markets happen? And that's been our vision and mission since the founding of the company. Our first foray was building an investor relations product. We can talk about why we started there if that's of interest. But since we've grown to also add fund administration and we now serve more than 2,000 GPs across all private markets asset classes, 40,000 funds, millions of investor positions, a pretty good scale in the industry.

• 3:12David Weisburd?

  You had this thesis that the private market was going to be as simple as the public markets. What was the first inkling or the first kernel that you saw that things were evolving in this direction?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  It was clear that the industry was growing rapidly. I mean, even back, you know, you could look today and every market study suggests that the private markets, which are already huge now, they're $30 trillion, $40 trillion of investor capital, depending on whose estimate you believe. And even today in 2025, they're set to double again over the next decade. But if you wind back the clock a decade ago to when we started Juniper Square, it was clear that there was a lot of growth coming into the private market sector. That's where the opportunity was. Companies were staying private longer and that's where you could find alpha more easily than the the public markets.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  And so it was clear to me that the sector was going to mature. It was going to become more systemically important. And it just seemed obvious that you would need digital infrastructure to support all aspects of the investing experience. And the hard question was just figuring out where to start. When we started the company, The Jobs Act had just been passed and that lowered the threshold for investing into private markets. And there were tons of crowdfunding companies that were being started around the time that we started Juniper Square. Probably two dozen real estate crowdfunding companies alone that were started plus minus

• 4:52Speaker 01

  a year of when we founded Juniper Square, which was February 2014. And the dominant mindset at the time was, ah, of course, the way the, these private markets are going to become digital is these direct websites of matching a, an investor with the sponsor directly. And we had a contrarian view on that. We didn't think that that was going to scale. We didn't think that the market of retail investors who self-direct their own investments, they do their own underwriting. We didn't think that was a very deep market. And we talked to enough GPs to know they care a lot about privacy and they care a lot about control. And the really good GPs are like a really good restaurant. It's very hard to get in.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  You know, so, so if you're a great GP in venture or you're a great GP in real estate or private equity, you don't need to go through the headache of posting your investments online because you have a line of people out the door that want to work with you. So we knew that whatever solution was going to be created for the private markets had to respect the foundational role of the GP. It had to keep them in control. It had to keep them at the center of the process. No GP was going to want their private funds aired out in the public markets, all their data floating around. That wasn't going to happen. So we were not a believer in crowdfunding from the very beginning. And we instead took this very orthogonal approach, which everyone thought was a very dumb idea at the time, which was starting with investor relations.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  I remember going around and pitching investors for our seed and our Series A rounds. And I talked to hundreds of investors and I said, we are going to build toward this big disruptive vision for private markets over multiple decades. And we're going to start by building investor relations software for, for GPs. And people laughed me out of the room. They were like, what a dumb idea. How small a market is this? And what we saw was that investor relations was this wedge for networking the GP and the LP together around a common record of fund ownership, that if you could help GPs with the reporting on

• 6:58Speaker 01

  their funds to the investors, that that was giving you sort of the permission to build the rails for the flow of information back and forth from GPs and LPs, that it was an easy bridge to building the payments infrastructure, the compliance infrastructure, everything that you'd need to have a much more robust market system. And so even though it was not an obvious idea at the time, for us, we saw investor relations as a sort of deeply strategic place to start. And we've been working on that since.

• 7:27David Weisburd?

  Which asset classes do you start in 2014? And how has that evolved? Who is Juniper Square focused on today?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  We started in the real estate sector because that's where I had relationships. It's, you know, in this kind of business, it's really hard to get, it's mission critical financial infrastructure. It's a GP's most sensitive data. Their investor relationships are their most sensitive relationships. You know, a system like Juniper Square houses millions of records of PII and, you know, social security numbers, payment records. So we have to take security very, very seriously. So it's a difficult product area to get a customer to go from zero to one, to trust you. And so there's a big chicken and the egg problem. If you have, you know, we scale now, we have 2,000 GPs, we have some of the largest asset managers in the world.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  And so the 25th hundred GP or whatever can look at everybody that's come before them and say, okay, maybe this company can be trusted. But that first customer, second customer, third customer, fourth, it's really hard. And so I relied a lot on personal relationships and where I built trust as a person to say, okay, I'll look you in the eye. You can trust me. We're not going to let you down. You know, we will, we will deliver for you. And those relationships for me were deepest in the real estate sector. So that's part of it. Second part of it is, we knew that we needed to make the problem as narrow and as small as possible. You know, so if you're going to try to go from zero to one in something, the smaller you can make that something, the more likely it is you're going to have a material impact. So we wanted to have the most narrow type of customer possible.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  And even though the variations across GPs, across asset classes, from the perspective of investor relations, fund administration, they don't matter very much. Obviously, the investing strategy is very different of what it is to be a venture capitalist versus a real estate fund manager. But when you talk about the operations of the fund and the accounting and the tax and the compliance and the movement of money, it's very similar across all the asset classes. So a big part of the reason that we focused on a single type of customer was because across private markets, people consider their peer set to be those who invest similarly to them, which is just to say, a venture capitalist does not consider a real estate

• 9:42Speaker 01

  investor to be their peer, just because they both invest out of closed-end private funds. They consider their peers to be other venture capitalists that they interface with, do business with, compete for deals with, et cetera. And so if you want to build customer momentum, if you want to build density, if you want to have a sense of rapid adoption, really narrowing down to a single type of customer where they all know each other, they're going to be talking, helps with that. And that's the other reason we chose real estate. And then since we've brought in to serve all private markets asset classes, really accept hedge funds. So we don't have a current practice of going to market in a dedicated way for hedge funds. We do support some, maybe a few dozen funds out of our tens of thousands, but it's not

• 10:26Speaker 01

  a current focus area for us. Otherwise, every private markets asset class, from commercial real estate to venture capital to private equity, to private credit, to crypto, to natural resources like ag and infrastructure and real assets, we've got customers across all those categories.

• 10:45David Weisburd?

  There's many lessons there to unpack for founders wanting to build large organizations like Juniper Square. One is you focused on half a product, not a half-assed product. That's a Jason Fried quote from 37 Signals. It's the idea that build a great product for one segment of the market versus a pretty good product for a lot of people. You want those early users and you want those early advocates for your product. Although Fund Admin isn't truly a marketplace, you focus very heavily on network effects and word of mouth. Which market can we gain enough market share and penetration quickly? So that people start referencing each other. And even though you might be small by number of customers,

• 11:29David Weisburd?

  you had a certain amount of critical mass within the industry.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 11:33David Weisburd?

  So your vision has been making Fund Admin as easy as clicking a button on the website, but it's not yet there today. You still use a lot of consulting and fund admins within the organization. So tell me about the intersection between technology and humans and how that's delivered to the customer.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  We do have many hundreds of fund accountants, investor services, managers, compliance, experts inside of our operation, even though we are a technology company. And the way to think about this is, you know, I always like to start with the customer whenever I'm thinking about anything. Who is the customer? What do they need? Why do they have a problem? And how is your solution unique? So the customer wants to buy a complete solution when they're buying fund administration, right? If you're a venture capitalist, what you want to do is focus on investing, running a fund, doing the accounting, doing KYC on your investors, handling subscriptions. You know, this is not what you want to be doing.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  There's no competitive advantage for you in owning this yourself. So it's fund administration and really the operation of your funds broadly speaking is a service that you want to rent versus own. So you start there with what the customer wants. Customers still do fund administration in-house. Tends to be customers that have been around much longer. So if you started your fund in the eighties, there really wasn't much of a fund administration industry to serve you. So you would have had to hire your own fund accountants and build out your own staff. But you know, it's pretty much a safe bet to say anybody that was starting a fund today would go turn to a third-party fund administrator to handle all the operations for them. So the customer wants to consume a complete solution.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  And the surface area for what you need to do in administering a fund, especially for a large, complex customer, is vast. You know, a single fund, you might say, ah, this is so-and-so venture, you know, venture funds, fund 10. Well, that fund 10 is going to be comprised of many different legal entities in many different jurisdictions, all of which have different types of investors, different logic, different rule sets, different reporting and regulatory requirements. And so the work that you have to do for the customer to deliver a complete solution is very vast. And if you took the approach of saying, we're just a tech company. All we're going to do is write code. It's the only thing that we do.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  You spend the next 10 years writing code to automate fund administration, and the customer's not going to buy the product for you, from you, until it's complete, right? So it's just not a viable approach. And anyway, this is an industry where what the customer really wants is they want an expert on the other end of the line. If you are a CFO of a fund, you want to be able to pick up the phone and call the controller at Jennifer Square, who's your fund, you know, controller, and feel confident that they know a lot about administering a fund. They know a lot about the accounting, about the, all the ins and outs. And so there's a human-to-human element of this business, which is just foundational.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  And if you're a tech company and you miss that, and you think it's just about software, you're missing half the plot. And so our whole approach was to recognize that you need both of these things. The customer wants excellent service from expert practitioners, and they want excellent tech. And they shouldn't have to sacrifice between those two. And this remains true, by the way, we can talk about AI if you want today, but this remains especially true with AI, where even though we see a huge acceleration in the automation and the total potential for what can be automated, we still deeply, fundamentally believe that the human-to-human interaction will play a critical role. That's not going away.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  And so the way to think about this is if there's 100 things to do to deliver a complete solution to the customer, you got to start out doing all 100. And you just start chipping away at it, eating away at those 100 with software. So on day one, you've automated zero, maybe day two, you've automated one and you keep going. You'll never get to 100 out of 100 in a situation.

• 15:57David Weisburd?

  Why is that?

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Because it, it, the, you know, you always want to direct your R and D to the next best marginal opportunity. And there's a Pareto principle at play here in this kind of service automation, just like there is everywhere, which is, you know, it might take whatever, you know, half of the work to do the first 90% of the automation. And then it'll take another half of the work to do the remainder. And maybe literally, you know, it asymptotes and you never finish. And so it'd be very foolish, you'd be better off taking your RD, you know, we spend 40, 50 million dollars a year on RD. You're, you're better off once you hit some point of Pareto optimal optimization,

• 16:41Speaker 01

  80%, 90%, 70%, whatever it is, taking those precious R and D dollars and capacity and directing it to the next big thing to solve for the customer. Like maybe you should do AI for them. Maybe you should help with their portfolio decision making. Maybe you should help them with tools that'll help them find their next investment. And that's a better use of your precious R and D dollar than trying to go from 80% automation to 90% automation, especially if you have this premise as we do, that CFOs are always going to want a human expert at the other end of the line to connect with and have that human relationship with.

• 17:15David Weisburd?

  You mentioned this use case, probably very common use case of CFO picks up the phone, calls the fund accountant. How does a fund accountant know what's going on with the fund? And tell me about how you staff your, your fund accountants? And how do you make sure that fund accountants are up to date on every client?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Well, it depends on the, the size and the complexity of the client. And so we have clients ranging from, uh, literally, you know, two people in a garage.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Just using our tools, our software tools to support their fundraising process, trying to raise their first fund. We have clients that don't even do funds at all. They just do sort of SPV fundraising, you know, get a single asset and go raise money against that single asset and they aren't commingled into a fund. And so we might have a customer that's done their first deal or has 20 million in, you know, investor capital commitments, all the way up to customers that have many hundreds of billions, global platforms, decades and decades of history. And so the needs of those customers are very, very different, you know, and so, so we sort of set up our, our operation to serve the needs of the customer

• 18:30Speaker 01

  based on their size and complexity. And, and then within size and complexity, you have more variation based on the type of investing strategy, the type of funds. So for example, administering a private credit fund that has as its assets loans that have a stream of payments and amortization schedule and all of that is very different than administering, you know, the same size fund which invests only in C corps, like Juniper Square, right? Where episodically you might have a distribution from an IPO or something like that, but otherwise

• 19:08Speaker 01

  it's very quiet in the fund. And then administering an open end fund where you have redemption, liquidity, queuing, all of that is very different from administering a closed end fund. And so you sort of, you know, create these distinction based on what the, the customer needs. And then the last bit of the kind of organizational design principle is you want durable pairings within the customer. So even though in theory, let's say, I don't actually think this is true, but in theory, it's tempting to think it's true, that you design a factory and you completely atomize the work and everybody does a tiny little bit of the work and you sort of shuffle it around, you know, and all I do is like stamp this paper when it

• 19:53Speaker 01

  comes on my desk and then I hand it to the next person, let's say, and they draw a circle on the paper and hand it to the next person, so on and so forth. That is, it might be tempting to think that's the most efficient way to organize. It's actually not. But what the customer really wants is a durable pairing. Customer wants the same person on their account, doing the same work quarter in, quarter out. Because there's a lot of institutional memory and knowledge that you build, not just about the customer's fund, but about the person that you're working with. You know, because we have to support a full range of, some of our customers don't have a CFO, it might just be two partners investing. You know, and they want to do a quarterly call and they don't know really anything about even interpreting fund financials. So you sort of need to educate them.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  We have other people that are absolute expert CFOs, peak of their profession. We have others that are just getting started. So everybody needs something different in terms of how they're supported, how they're coached, how they're helped. And then what we do is we use almost all of our own infrastructure, almost all of our own software tooling inside of our operations. So all of the data, all of the investor interfaces, all the compliance rails, the payments rails, all the reporting interface, the communications system, every PDF that's produced, all of it's produced on Juniper Square code. The one exception is our general ledger. We use a third-party general ledger and then we have a very deep integration with that third-party general ledger.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  So our accountants are doing their work inside of Juniper Square and that's their dashboard for understanding everything about the fund, its metadata, its reporting, all of it.

• 21:28David Weisburd?

  Many, many things to unpack there. You mentioned this institutional knowledge that goes with a fund accountant associated with a certain fund. How do you institutionalize that within Juniper Square? And is there a way to generalize that knowledge or institutionalize that within Juniper Square?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  You might say, well, what are the things you want to know about a fund? Right? What's its metadata? So you'd say, okay, well, I've got hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents written in legal language and I need to extract all of the semantic meaning and the, you know, metrics and the logic from this form, which is a legal agreement and get it into the software code. So that I can, that I can work with it, right? So, so for example, one of the things that the legal agreement will spell out is what's commonly known as the waterfall in a fund, right? Which is basically thought of as who gets what money and when, right? And so sometimes there's a, a rate of return that the GP has to clear before profits start getting split.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Sometimes there's different share classes among investors and so share class A will get some amount of money before share class B does and so forth. And so it's just a piece of logic that explains how the profits from a fund flow. Well, that starts out written as legal language and you extract that legal language and encode it in software so that you're now doing math based on the logic that was established in that legal agreement. And so that general property is true across not just the waterfall, but lots and lots of sort of rules, so to speak, or logic about how the fund works. And so we have a lot of software that we've built over the years that helps with that extraction, helps with things like waterfall automation, automates the subscription process

• 23:16Speaker 01

  for the investors so that when you're bringing the investor into the fund, you're gathering all the data that you need from them. And then the benefit of seeing the network effect that's inherent in private markets is that, you know, we have 600,000 unique LPs on Juniper Square across millions of positions. So on average, we have multiple positions per LP. So this means a typical LP signs into Juniper Square and then they have many GPs and many investments that they're centrally managing through one Juniper Square account. This gives us the ability to understand this LP not as a, you know, line of legal language in an agreement, but as David with, with the social security number.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  And that means that we can do things like send you through KYC once. On Juniper Square, then not have to do it for you again. And you get to reuse that across different GPs and across different funds. That's how you get to this sort of one-click type experience for the LP is that you're storing all the metadata about you as the

• 24:18David Weisburd?

  There are network effects there.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  There's, there's definitely network effects there.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  And then the other kind of big class of data is about the fund's investing strategy and its approach and, and its asset composition. Cause again, that's going to drive, you know, if it's a credit fund, you're going to need to set it up in a certain way. If it's an MLP that owns natural gas interests, you're going to have to set up in a different way. If it's a venture fund that owns C corp investments, you set it up in a different way. And then the third is really all the knowledge that you build working with the customer.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Right? How do they do things inside of their GP? Cause the, the beauty of the private markets, you know, the public markets, you have a regulator. That regulator serves the dual roles of both creating the standards around reporting and then enforcing them. And so everybody who's reporting their financials to the public markets, they're doing it exactly the same way. By definition, you have to, if you want to stay listed, same standard, same methodology, same everything. In the private markets, it's totally different. Every GP does it differently. Sort of by design, they could set it up how they want. They're unregulated, unregistered, private investments. And so every GP's developed their own methodology for reporting. They've developed their own frameworks for how they like to do things.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  So part of what we're learning when we're engaging with a new client is all of that sort of unstructured, but very, very important knowledge of, of how that GP likes to work. And so this is why you want really, ideally you want really stable pairings through time.

• 25:50David Weisburd?

  And let me ask you, maybe a somewhat crude question, but as GPs scale, they, they interact with institutional LPs and most of the time the LP that they're dealing with, the head of private capital markets or the head of venture is not the person managing the back office. Why should GPs care about the experience of the person managing the back office if that's not who they're interacting with? And that's not who the person that's making the decision on whether to re-up?

• 26:22Speaker 01

  There's a couple of ways to, to take this. The first, I think most impactful way to take this is if you look at the growth expected in the private markets industry, half of it is going to come from the retail investor. And so it's a totally wrong way of thinking to say there's a front office investor and then a back office investor and I can, I can think of those as different people. You've just got David who's writing a check to your venture fund, right? And so what's David's experience, right? Is it really great, both experiencing all the returns you're delivering for him, but also getting the reporting that you're, you're sending to him? Also making the legal and compliance and subscription and reporting process all really easy?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Are you, you know, or are you creating this huge cleavage, this, this big divide where like it's absolute? I mean, I've invested with funds where I've been stuck in KYC hell for months, right? Not, no exaggeration, like endless document follow-up and just, you know, like, cause you're stuck inside of some big bank that's doing their fund administration. And like, that is not a good experience for your LP. And so I think what people are realizing is that these worlds are converging. And if you want to access the capital, the growth that's coming into the industry, you're going to have to deliver a consumer grade digital experience of the likes that everyone's used to from the public markets.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  And so that's the first most impactful thing that I would say. The second thing is that we have seen, just in the time that I've been working on Juniper Square, so a little more than a decade, the shift, you know, if you, if you look at the investor that really kind of built the, helped build the private markets, it was really the defined benefit pension plan, the public private pension plans, think the, you know, California state teacher retirement system, or public employee pension system, or the big pensions of Canada, you know, and then there are obviously insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds and so forth. But these investors tended to be advised by consultants.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  A lot of the data that GP was providing were going to the consultants who would package it up for like a quarterly report to the investment committee. The investor was fairly passive. They wrote huge checks. You know, you fly to one meeting in Sacramento and come away with a $250 million commitment.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  And that has really changed over the decade that I've been doing this because every investor now realizes that information, data on the underlying performance of the assets is where the smart decisions are going to come from. Right. And so it's not acceptable to have this sort of duality where you've got perfect data coming from systems like Aladdin, you know, from BlackRock. In the public markets, you can understand risk, you can understand exposure, you know exactly what you're investing in. And then your private markets are just this total black box. Where you have no idea what you hold. And the perfect example of this is look at what happened in the mortgage crisis, in a way, so much of the problem of the mortgage crisis was that

• 29:33Speaker 01

  all of these CMBS instruments, and then all of this credit default swaps that were the first derivative of them, they all were packaged up and bundled in these spreadsheets. Like literally, that's how it was done inside of the bank. So you'd have like, you know, the asset, the CMBS asset or the CDS would just have like this list of all these unique identifiers and a payment stream. And you'd have no way to actually assess the risk of the, of the, of the portfolio. And so you have to by default, assume the worst and everybody marks everything to zero. And then you have this runaway collapse like we saw. So there's one way of talking about that story, which is there was a big information problem here through various levels of a value chain. Private markets has the exact same issue where investors have really woken up to this and

• 30:15Speaker 01

  the sophisticated investors, the sovereign wealth funds, that the sophisticated family offices, university endowments, they are very demanding on the type of data that they want to see from GPs. And it's not uncommon at all that an investor will have their own super complex custom spreadsheet that they'll send to a GP every quarter and say, fill this out asset by asset. I want all these KPIs.

• 30:37David Weisburd?

  Thank you for listening. To join our community and to make sure you do not miss any future episodes, please click the follow button above to subscribe. Give me an example on, on some of those requests for what the sophisticated institutional LPs are asking for from GPs.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Well, let's just take like the real estate sector as an example. So let's say you're a big sovereign wealth fund. And let's say that

• 31:00Speaker 01

  You oversee, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in real estate commitments globally. And those are distributed across hundreds of manager relationships. And, uh, and you also do direct investing. Uh, maybe you've got a direct investing team. Maybe you also have a series of separately managed account. Like a programmatic joint venture relationships with some managers. Well, if all of a sudden there's something that happens in the world. COVID tariffs, whatever, uh, you're now trying to assess risk. We own a trillion dollars worth of real estate. Is it impaired? What's, you know, what, what's happening? What should we do? Should we sell? Should we rebalance? How should we manage risk? To understand risk, you have to know what you own.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  You, you have, you can't just say, I own a trillion dollars of real estate with a hundred managers. You have to know, well, I own industrial, I own, you know, in, in, in North America, I own office in China. I own, and then you, you go down further and say, well, I actually want to know the individual assets. I want to know every building that I own, every piece of land that I own. And you go further and say, well, I really need to understand the cash flow on that asset. Like what's, what's the NOI, uh, the net operating income, which is a sort of cash flow term from real estate. What's the leverage on the asset? Right? Um, what's the, the last mark? What's the, um, uh, value, marked value of that asset? How's that roll up to the fund structure? What's the NAV of the fund? What's the leverage on the fund that owns, owns the asset?

• 32:32Speaker 01

  So you want to be able to start at the level of an individual building that you own in a, in a multi hundred billion dollar portfolio. And then you want to get up to a level of being able to understand exposure, risk, leverage, et cetera, at a portfolio. And you really can only do that at a portfolio level if you understand the component parts. So the way that that shows up for a GP is if they get a commitment from this big sovereign wealth fund. More than likely, the sovereign wealth fund is going to put a side letter on their commitment that says you have to report in our template to our standard. And some of these are extreme. Some of these are like, they require a different accounting methodology. That's custom to that LP and the way that they treat accounting.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  So you actually have to like run different math on the underlying assets. That's how complex it gets. And it's now all of a sudden the GP is facing down. Wait, I've got hundreds of LPs that have hundreds of different spreadsheets and how am I going to manage all of this? And it's a really, it becomes a really big data problem, but it's that's sort of the cost of doing business. It's a cost of getting access to capital in a world where investors have woken up to the idea that they have to manage their portfolios, they have to manage risk. It's not okay to just have their relationship with the manager be a black box that they don't understand. The mortgage crisis, the global financial crisis kind of blew that up going all the way back to 08, 09, and we're still dealing with the ramifications of that.

• 33:53David Weisburd?

  And Juniper Square helps with these side letters. And talk to me about Juniper Square's business model and how you charge GPs and what are the, are there different packages? And, and just talk to me about how you align your goals with the goals of the GPs.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Well, pricing in the fund administration industry is pretty standard. So we didn't have to invent much here. We just had to sort of follow the industry, the industry standard. And pricing does vary. I mean, one, it is a very consultative collaborative relationship. So one of the things that we're always doing with the customer is working with them to construct a pricing model that's going to best fit where they are in their fund life and how they want to manage things. So for example, if you're just starting out as a GP and you're raising your first fund, maybe you haven't even called your management fees yet. You might be broke. You know, there's no money in a bank account for you to be paying your fund admin. And so

• 34:52Speaker 01

  you might be willing to pay us a lot more if we will shape the curve of your fees to match the life cycle of your fund and to match your fees as a manager, right? Whereas let's say you've been around for 20 years and you know, you've got hundreds of millions of dollars a year coming in from management fees. What you want to do is lower the over, the total cost of ownership, right? Cause you have the money to pay us today. So we'll work with customers to create a shape for the fee structure. And then generally, there's a bunch of different ways to price, but generally the rule of thumb is that you're pricing as a, it's an extremely small percentage, but you're pricing as a percentage of the fund's commitments.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Right, and it's usually expressed in a very small number of basis points.

• 35:42David Weisburd?

  It's essentially the cash flow or the future cash flow of the manager. So you might be getting smaller amount in the beginning and working with them. And then as they get bigger, you get higher fees.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, because the manager's business model, you know, the traditional business model for private markets investors, two and 20. You know, this, you know, 2% annual management fee and 20% of the profits. And this varies by asset class, right? As managers become extremely proven, I've seen two and 30, I've seen two and 40.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  And then oftentimes managers will trade management fee for more promote, you know, one and a half, 30 or one and 30.

• 36:22David Weisburd?

  And do you find LPs like that, lower fees, higher carry? Obviously, there's thousands of LPs, but as a general rule, would they rather have two and 20 or one and 30?

• 36:36Speaker 01

  It's hard for me to say, because I don't feel like I can speak for LPs. What I can say is that there's a growing sense of fee sensitivity coming to the industry. Not surprisingly, that is sort of a part of maturation of the industry, especially where we are right now. If you look at where we are right now in the cycle, we are probably in the longest drought of venture returns to LPs that the industry has gone through. Because there have been no IPOs and there's no M and A.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  And there was a huge drawdown of commitments in the run up, sort of post-COVID, pre-interest rate hikes. So, you know, LPs just shoveled money out the door. Into venture funds through the ZERP era and especially in those years between COVID and the interest rate hikes. And then now they've seen no capital return to them because there's no IPOs. You know, there's a big slate of IPOs that were scheduled. I was just in New York yesterday talking to a major market maker and it's, it's, you know, crickets, right? Everybody's, you know, because of the, because of the Trump tariffs, there's, you know, everybody's pulled their listing.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Everybody's sort of going to wait it out and see what happens post Labor Day, which really means we're into 2026 before much meaningful happens, unless we see some sort of massive change to status quo and a lot more certainty arrive quickly. So now 2025 is going to be a year without IPO returns. And then if you look at the commercial real estate sector, same story. Commercial real estate was hit really hard in COVID. You know, imagine owning hospitality hotels, you know, when everybody was, you know, sitting at home or imagine owning office buildings when everyone shifts to working from home. Retail got hammered and we've seen this big structural sort of change in that industry.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  And now we're dealing with, you know, moving out of a ZERP era with almost, you know, sort of very, very low long-term rates. We're now very stubbornly in these sort of high long-term rate category, which is very challenging for the asset class. It's very capex intensive to a huge wall of maturities coming in CMBS, for example. And so I can't speak for LPs, but what I can say is we're at a moment in time where there's both this tension that there's a lot of bullish attitude on the asset class in the long term. Everyone recognizes the opportunities in private.

• 39:26David Weisburd?

  Companies are staying private longer, et cetera.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  And also, there's an element of like, show me the money, right? Like, where are my returns? I've been investing in venture for a decade. I'm waiting on my returns.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  And so I think all that drives greater fee sensitivity. And the last thing I'd say is just investors care a lot about alignment of incentives. Right? So paying out huge management fees, like all things being equal, myself as an LP, I would much rather have a manager who's incentivized on the promote and, you know, who's going to make money when I make money than a manager who's playing the AUM aggregation game. Which is, you know, if you go look at like venture, you go look at like what a lot of big venture funds are doing, you go look at what a lot of the conglomerate multi-strategy managers are doing, it's that in a world where everyone pays 2 and 20, the, you know, some level, you can sort of make a choice and say, okay, am I going to deliver incredible

• 40:23Speaker 01

  returns by, you know, picking one out of 20, one out of 50 Googles, right? And then I would get $8 billion returned to a $500 million fund or something like that. Or am I just going to say, I get 2% of, you know, every dollar that I have in commitment? So instead of being a $3 billion manager, I'm going to be a $300 billion manager. And you've seen a lot of managers pursuing that AUM aggregation game because it's just the 2 and 20 business model, maybe other than Googles, is like the best business model ever, right? It's like totally recession proof. It's totally recurring. The 2% management fee is, the commitment is made by investors that are the best credit

• 41:08Speaker 01

  in the world, you know? It's giant sovereign wealth funds and so forth. So it'll be interesting to see how this shakes out over time, but I think the one certainty will be more pressure on fees.

• 41:17David Weisburd?

  Give me context into your customer base by number of customers. What percentage are in venture, private equity, real estate, or however you delineate?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  There's, how many GPs do you have? There's how much AUM do you have? And then there's how much revenue do you have? And they actually kind of all have different mixtures for us. So the history of the company is in real estate. So we have more real estate managers than any other manager. In fact, I'm quite certain we have more real estate managers on Juniper Square than any other. Company, full stop. So we're very, very deep in the real estate industry. But because of the history of the company, you know, when you start a company, you start out serving small and mid-sized customers that are relatively easy to serve. They have, you know, fairly simple needs. And then over time, you migrate to serving the, you know, CBREs of the world, largest global

• 42:13Speaker 01

  real estate owner, for example, is a customer of ours. You don't start out serving CBRE. So we have a greater number of smaller customers in real estate. So it's actually a smaller share of revenue than you would think. Our entry into private equity and venture capital and private credit has come later. But because it's so we've got, you know, hundreds of managers in each of those versus thousands. But because our entry is later, we come in and we serve much larger customers. So it's a very significant share of our revenue in those in those asset classes. The way to think about this, the way that I think about this at the limit is just where is the capital in the industry, right? And so private equity, think traditional growth and buyout

• 42:58Speaker 01

  private equity is the largest asset class by both AUM and manager count.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Real estate is probably the second largest. Real estate is always tends to be understated on all of the kind of pre-when and pitch book type reports. Something like 40% of our managers on Juniper Square don't show up in pre-when or pitch book as an example.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Because it tends to be

• 43:23David Weisburd?

  Why is that?

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Because those are companies that have built their data sets primarily by FOIA request of public pension. So so public pensions are required to post their meeting minutes publicly. And then in those meeting minutes are all of the commitments of those LPs to all the different fund managers, including their performance and everything else. And so if you just go run a FOIA process on those public pension investors or any other investors that are subject to public filings, then you can go from the minutes, extract all this data and build this graph of the fund managers and who's invested where. But you're

• 43:59David Weisburd?

  Yeah. Why? Why do so many private managers not want their AUM out there? What are the pros and cons of having your private fund information out there?

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Well, I think to a large degree, it depends on your strategy, right? So there are some strategies that, and you see this. So let me give you an example.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  And we don't really serve hedge funds today. But this is an obvious one to point out. So let's say you're an activist investor, you know, and then you accumulate short positions. And then the way that you like to influence companies is you accumulate controlling short positions. And then you very quietly influence the board. But your whole strategy is like, I, my benefit here is like, I don't have big public fights. I, I work with existing management teams to drive the change that I want to see in companies. Well, you have an incentive to be very quiet. You don't want people to know how much AUM you have. You don't want people to know where you're accumulating short positions. You don't want people to know anything about your strategy, right?

• 45:06Speaker 01

  If on the other hand, let's say you're a venture investor. And you're trying to make it known that you are open for business and you want to underwrite, you know, early stage AI deals, especially focused on developer tooling or whatever. You're going to be shouting from the rooftops about who you are. You're going to go on every podcast, you're going to write blogs, you're going to host events, you're going to try and, you know, do the complete, be very active on Twitter. Because it's in your business model's interest to promote yourself. And so it really, it depends on, on the asset class and, and the strategy. And for the history of the private markets industry, it's one where the type of marketing was one-on-one relationship building.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  It was visiting people in offices and there was sort of like a decorum that grew up around that, right of, and, and look, people go in, you know, you're going to become a really great growth private equity investor. You know, chances are you love doing deals. You love underwriting companies, you love creating operational alpha through companies. And, and you probably don't like, you don't love marketing, you know? You don't love running the operations of your own company. So there's some element of this, which is just people in this industry are investors first and foremost. Now, this is changing a lot, right? Like Mark Rowan of Apollo is on record saying that Apollo spent more than a billion dollars over the last three years, building out its retail distribution arm.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  They have more than a hundred people focused on this. We, you know, Blackstone's doing TV commercials now. So as the industry is shifting to recognizing, okay, the growth is coming from retail.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  There's this recognition that you have to change and become much more out there with the marketing and become much more public.

• 46:50David Weisburd?

  Double click on retail, we all see these headlines at the CEO of I Capital, Lawrence Calcano on the podcast, these tens of trillions, maybe a hundred trillion dollars, whatever the number of retail coming into alternatives.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:08David Weisburd?

  You have the system of record, you see what funds are doing. How much of that has already started? How much of that do you expect in the near future?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it is a story right now for sure of it being on the come. You know, if we just go look at the data and we say, all right, the last $100 billion or whatever, you know, that showed up on Juniper Square, what were the sources and what were its channels? It's still predominantly institutional. And so when we talk about the retail channel, it's prospectively talking about its potential. It's still a reasonably small share of the private markets industry as a whole. Now, for the companies that are really pursuing it aggressively, and there are only a handful, right?

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Blackstone, Apollo, Starwood, Carlyle, KKR.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  The, for these companies, these handful, it is forming a meaningful share of the total capital that they're raising. And they're on record talking about expecting it to become, you know, half of all the capital they raise. Eventually, I think Steve Schwarzman said a majority of the capital that Blackstone raises eventually. But the thing to recognize is there's a huge power law in effect, which is if you look at all the capital raised through, you know, retail and, you know, broker dealer and RIA, you sort of aggregate all the channels that represent, you know, ultimately reaching an individual investor writing a check. There's a massive power law at play where, you know, Blackstone and Apollo together are

• 48:50Speaker 01

  probably raising 90% of the capital, just those two GPs. And then like the next three or four GPs are raising like the next six or eight percent of the capital. So they account for, you know, so top three to five GPs account for like 98% of all the capital raised. And then you have this long tail of managers who are trying to raise through the retail channel, but haven't yet cracked the code. And one of the challenges is there's a certain set of things that you have to have as a GP to really be successful raising through retail. One is a brand and awareness. People know who Blackstone is, but people might not know who some, you know, sharpshooter local VC is. Two is you need to have a distribution

• 49:31Speaker 01

  team actually taking those products to market. Three is you have to be patient and willing to engage in a multi-level sales cycle where you have to go sell a broker or sell an RIA, get your fund on platform, and then you have to sell it through to the ultimate advisor and client. So it's like this multi-step, multi-year sale cycle, very different from flying to Abu Dhabi to get a, you know, $250 million check. And then the products themselves, what's become clear is the product that works in retail is one that is open-ended, it has liquidity. So these, these sort of evergreen registered fund structures. So you can't be relying on the traditional exemptions that private managers have relied on to be successful.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  It's got to be a registered fund, registered with the SEC. And then it's got to have liquidity, like real, meaningful liquidity, not just like, you know, up to 5% of the funds now. But if you look at like a lot of products, you know, I think Apollo's done this with State Street, Blackstone's done this. I think KKR is doing this with their balance sheet in some of their evergreen vehicles. There's like real commitments to backstop liquidity.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  And this is, I think, part of what made Blackstone so successful. They had a huge run on the bank in their B REIT, just crazy amount of outflows, like billions of dollars of outflows every month. You know, they're getting, you know, some multiple of outflows every month as people were souring on the commercial real estate industry during the rate hikes. And they backstopped that liquidity, you know, they they allow the redemptions to take place. They went and did a deal with the UC system to help backstop that liquidity. And so that's what you have to be willing to sign up for. And for a lot of managers, especially if you're small, it's a really tough, that's a really tough pill to swallow. You know, if you do 500 million dollar venture funds, that's really tough to think, go look at that channel. So I'm going to suit up and go attack it.

• 51:28David Weisburd?

  When we last chatted, you mentioned that GPs must reinforce at every touch point why LPs made investment. What did you mean by that?

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Well, I think this comes back to the front office, back office point that you were making before, which is just that I think the GPs who do this really well, understand that every interaction with the LP is an opportunity to build trust in the relationship and that fundamentally, GPs are in the game of trust, right? Give me your money and trust that I will give you more back in the future if you let me go do with it, you know, what I what I please. And trust compounds over time. Trust is built by a collection of a lot of interactions that all sort of aggregate toward this outcome, which is I trust you.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  And so the GPs who really get it recognize they're in the game of building and maintaining trust with LPs. And when you see it that way, you can take that trust and bridge to lots of different types of investing strategies. You know, you could say, because you trust me in real estate, you should trust me in real estate tech, you know, because you trust me in real estate tech, you should trust me in tech. And so you've seen these managers bridge. From one asset class to another, those who really, really get this well.

• 52:46David Weisburd?

  A lot of those same players that you mentioned, Blackstone, obviously in venture, Andreessen has gone into a bunch of different stuff. General Catalyst has gone into credit. So there's many use cases around that.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Yeah. And so what you want to do is recognize, okay, every opportunity that I have with the LP, whether it's as mundane as the quarterly reporting, or the subscription process, or how I answer their ad hoc questions, or how responsive I am, or you know, how frequently I see them. These are all opportunities to build trust. And the more complete you can build a system of interaction with the LP that facilitates that, the more successful ultimately you're going to be as a firm because you're dealing in this currency. It's a different way of thinking than thinking, my job is to deliver returns. Right? And the good news there is if you frame your, you frame your mindset in the right way, then that trust can survive the vicissitudes of the market,

• 53:40Speaker 01

  right? It can survive the dislocations where you're losing money. Because even an opportunity where an investment goes south is a great opportunity to build trust with the LP and how you handle that. Right?

• 53:52David Weisburd?

  I asked John Gray, who runs Blackstone now, what he did during downturns. Obviously, it's not, the market's not always going up. And he said, gets on a plane, meets with every single LPs, gets in front of the news, communicate, communicate, communicate, which sounds obvious. It's one of those things that is easier said than done. You've seen now since 2014, some GPs start small, scale, others start small and not scale. And sometimes not because of strategy, but because they fail to build these trusted relationships with LPs. What have been the best practices in terms of GPs that have been able to scale their trusted relationships with LPs and build real platforms?

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of it comes down to what I talked about, which is those who do this really well, care very, very deeply about things that seem mundane like reporting.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Right. They care very deeply about how their investments are portrayed, about the quality of information they're getting to LPs, about the frequency, about the timeliness. Because they believe that this represents their brand and it represents part of the the trust building that they're in the business of conveying. And so, but beyond that, to answer your question directly, I think the thing that obviously impacts the investing industry almost more than any other is just where are you in cycle timing? Right? So if you raised your first venture fund, you know, in 2020,

• 55:30Speaker 01

  and you deployed it like crazy in 18 months, you know, you shoveled all the money out the door at, you know, 2020 and 2021 prices for companies. And now you've got no realizations in your portfolio. Right? You've got a portfolio of assets where no one believes the marks. Right? Where you've had massive compression in the public markets and comparables where it's going to take many years, if ever, for you to get back to the valuations at which you invested in companies at. It's going to be really hard for you to raise a second fund and I don't care how good your reporting is. Right? So a lot of it has to do with cycle and market timing. Whereas let's say in 2009, if you're like, hey, I'm going to start a fund and I'm just going to buy technology beta.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Right? I'm going to try and pick winners. I'm just literally going to buy beta in tech, starting in 2009. You would look like a genius by 2020 and you'll have built up such a track record on that beta strategy that you can survive paying overinflated prices in 20 and 21 because people have been with you since 2009. Might be the exact same manager, might be the exact same company picking skillset. And a lot of it just has to do with the cycle that you got started in.

• 56:47David Weisburd?

  If you think of GPs with assets, you know, small number of assets call it crawling, mid-range, walking, large, running. Do you see this kind of very slow crawl for a decade or several decades? And then this kind of explosion assets? Or is it more linear? And what's, what's the typical? Kind of cadence or growth of a GP?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  I can answer it within venture. It varies a lot depending on the asset class, right? So like how a GP accumulates and grows in real estate is going to be a very different pattern from how a venture GP, how a venture GP grows. And then there's this other distinction too, which is is someone starting out in the industry from scratch, in which case they have to scrape together their first $20 million seed fund and then raise a $50 million seed fund and then $100 million seed Series A fund and they're just sort of slowly working their way up the food chain? Or are they a recognized name and sort of a storied partner from one firm who's spinning

• 57:56Speaker 01

  out with a track record, in which case they can go out and raise a billion dollar fund, you know, immediately? And you see both of those patterns and they scale, they scale differently, right? But one thing that is observable is that for a long time in the industry of venture capital, there was a fair amount of discipline around fund size, right? So, so venture managers would have a strategy. You know, we invest in this type of company and this type of sector and at this stage, and our typical check size is X for Y percent ownership, right? And we deploy Z checks per fund and that's how many bets we have. We reserve this amount for follow-on and so forth.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  And they're, they had a strategy that was in a fund size that was tuned to that model. And then what we saw in the late teens and sort of the post-COVID run-up, all of which we're still dealing with the ramifications of this post-interest rate hikes, is people lost that discipline and people went from saying, well, geez, let's, you know, look at the fees on a $2.5 billion fund. I like that a lot better than a $500 million fund. And if everybody's shoveling cash out the door, LPs are shoveling cash out the door. It's hard to resist that pull. And so what you saw was a lot of managers that got big. Not necessarily in a disciplined way.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  And I see a lot of of our customers raising smaller funds, both because that's just what the market allows them to do right now, but also because in some sense, they're kind of getting back to their roots and saying, okay, you know, we got a little crazy there. Let's get back to a smaller, more focused, more niche strategy going forward. And that takes a lot of discipline. It's like really hard to kind of curtail your fee income and the laws of scaling once you're on a path. And so I think it's really impressive when managers have the discipline to do that.

• 59:56David Weisburd?

  I mentioned general catalyst went from venture capital, venture capital and credit. And you've seen some asset managers successfully scale from one asset class to multiple asset classes. What are some best practices to keep in mind for GPs are looking to accomplish this?

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Well, the trust point I've already made, so I won't reiterate that here. But I think the the GPs who are really good, really look at investing from first principles. And I think a lot of the distinctions that defined or delineated kind of one investing type from another are starting to blur. So so let me give you an example. In the real estate sector, one of the kind of really hot sub micro classes right now is what is called GP stakes investing. So in real estate, you have a lot of deals that are underwater. They need to be recapitalized.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  You've got a lot of GPs who built business models, anticipating, you know, hired teams and so forth, anticipating they would raise a new fund every 18 to 24 months. And all of a sudden, that funding has dried up. Those GPs are in trouble. They need money to operate. Their deals need to be recapitalized. And so savvy investors out there realize that there's really great opportunity in, you know, not only doing recaps and taking senior positions in.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  These real estate deals, but also becoming an owner of the GP itself. So now all of a sudden, that's like venture investing, you know, like I'm picking David and I'm making a bet that David is going to go on to 10x in his career and I'm going to own a share of his management company. So now all of a sudden, what used to be this big delineation or distinction that real estate was about buildings, you know, and NOI and cash flow and foot traffic and things like this. All of a sudden, in GP stakes investing, looks a lot more like venture. Early stage venture, betting on a founding team, having limited information, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and know who's going to go on to succeed.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  And I think that great GPs see this, you know, and they're not bounded by these classical delineations of like, well, I invest in buildings. You know, and instead they sort of approach it from first principles and say, in this current market opportunity, where is, or in this current market climate, where's the opportunity? And that's why you've seen this huge rotation into private credit. Right. It's incredible opportunity right now in private credit.

• 1:02:35David Weisburd?

  We love, love GP stakes. You have institutional investors, some of them even register as a completely new asset class and has different pockets because it has equity like components, credit like components. And it's semi liquid because it starts paying management fees. It's fascinating asset class. You've committed $200 million into R and D over the next five years. Presumably most of that is going into AI. What are some features that you guys are working on? That you're excited about when it comes to integrating AI into Juniper Square?

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  I'm very excited about AI, very, very.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Okay, so what we are doing is, you could think of what we're doing in the end state here is a GP is going to have an agent from us for every part of their business. Right. They're going to have an agent that helps them do investor relations. And that's everything from helping them with fundraising and finding the right LPs to target and handling all the minutia around exchanging documents and data room invites and keeping the CRM update and all of it. All the way through to like, that agent will be the interface for the GP to the LP, you know, GP will always stay in control. But, you know, when I look at the future of Juniper Square, for example, I think that it's more likely in the future

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  that customers who really want to go deep with us on the product. Right? Want to spend hours and hours and hours and hours. They're going to be doing that with an agent of Juniper Square, who's a PhD level expert on Juniper Square, who's infinitely patient, who will be on the phone or the Zoom with them at three in the morning, you know, answering with a cheerful attitude, the most mundane or detailed questions that they could have. I think it'll be the same thing in private markets investing, right? The GPs will have agents that are complete experts, PhD level experts on their track record, on their investing history, on their strategy, on the returns, right? And we are

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  the store of all that data for GPs. Millions and millions of documents in Juniper Square. We've got all of the investment track record, the portfolio data for these managers. So we can work with our customers to tune and train those agents, keeping the customer in control, because it's not like you want to let an agent loose to hallucinate and say anything. But very clearly, this is where the technology is going. We'll build an agent for the CFO to manage all their fund admin relationships, to be absorbing all that data from the fund admins, making sense of it, doing QA on it, looking for internal consistency, etc. We'll build an agent to help GPs with portfolio management, portfolio decisioning,

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  agents to help GPs with investment decision making. The actual construction of agents is not hard. Once you have solved foundational fundamental problems, then foundational fundamental problems are, you have the unique data, do you have the source of truth that's required to really train that agent, right? Like, one of the foundational model agents off the shelf can pretend to be the GP's expert agent on their track record for about two seconds, right? And then they're going to gonk out and hallucinate. And so there's a lot of work to have the agent really become expert on the GP, the GP strategy, their data, everything else. You need to have the domain knowledge, and you need to have the data to do that

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  training. So that's one. Two is, you have to respect the really complex security requirements, data security, data privacy, you know, the actual security of data requirements that our very large enterprise customers have. And that includes the permissions layer that's required for these agents to work. So if you're training the agent on having access to every person in the GP's email inbox. That might be a great way to train the agent, but you don't want the managing partner's email with some LP, you know, to come up and be visible to the associate at the firm. So, so this distinction of, you know, training on broad corpus of data, but then keeping this really tight permissioning

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  is something that we're already very good at with our customers. And then the last thing is these agents need to be operating over real world infrastructure for them to do stuff that's useful. Right? You do invite an LP to the data room. You need to move them through the subscription process. You need to issue a payment, issue payment. You need to have payment rails. You need to be connecting the banking system. You need to be connected to the regulators, you know? And so we look at our goal, at our job as really providing that foundational platform that all the agents are built on. We call that Junie AI and we're going to be launching that in a few months here. And then on top of that platform, we will construct essentially limitless agents for the GP. We'll eventually give them the tools. They can construct their own agents.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Everything from investment analysts to, you know, IR associates. But the really hard part here is not agent construction. It's not like the, the chat interface that's hard. It's, it's, it's getting the data right, the permissions right, the fine tuning right. So that the agent is actually useful and that's a big part of what we're focused on as a company.

• 1:07:45David Weisburd?

  You guys are a system of record for a lot of GPs. Give me a sense for the AUM that you're the system of record for today. May 2025.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Total AUM is trillions. So, so total AUM of underlying assets would be trillions. Active investor commitments, I think about a trillion and a half. And then we probably have another, maybe like three or four trillion of completed investment history. Cause keep in mind, when we onboard a customer, they might be on Fund Seven.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Right. So they're vesting out of Fund Seven, but we onboard all the data from Funds One through Six. That data is very valuable for helping the customer train, train models, train agents.

• 1:08:29David Weisburd?

  Well, Alex, this has been fascinating deep dive into Fund Admin.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Of your enthusiasm and curiosity.

• 1:08:35David Weisburd?

  I appreciate it. It's genuine and it's real. How should people follow you and how should people keep up with what Juniper Square is working on?

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm active on LinkedIn. That's where I'm active for work. I'm active on Twitter, too, for I've got a whole bunch of health interests. I'm active on Twitter there for that stuff. But my I cleave my selves into two. My professional self is representing Juniper Square and private markets and AI and all that stuff on LinkedIn. So Alex Robinson, Juniper Square on LinkedIn. And then, of course, the company, junipersquare.com. You can find us there.

• 1:09:11David Weisburd?

  Thank you, David. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Alex. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. This helps us grow, also provides the very best feedback when we review the episode's analytics. Thanks for your support.