Why Infrastructure Will Power the Private Markets Forward

In 2013, our CEO and Co-founder, Alex Robinson, was investing as a private markets LP for the first time and expected the same digital experience he’d had in public markets: a secure workflow, a simple online process, and a clean transfer of capital. Instead, he received inches of paper, notary requirements, and multiple back-and-forth shipments to correct handwritten errors.

With tens of trillions of dollars flowing through private markets, Robinson wanted to understand why a digital backbone, long taken for granted elsewhere in finance, was missing. How can there be no market infrastructure? How can there be no technology for what is clearly a very important sector within the broader financial ecosystem?” he thought.

In a recent conversation on the Modern Capital Podcast, Robinson unpacked why that gap existed, why it’s finally closing, and what it will take for the private markets to reach true maturity.

Robinson outlined three structural reasons the private markets were underserved for decades.
First, software innovation in the 90s and early 2000s tended to focus on horizontal use cases. Enterprise tech targeted broad categories—CRM, ERP, HR—leaving specialized verticals to make do with stitched-together customizations that aged poorly and scaled worse. What the industry needed was “technology transitions that ultimately reduced the cost of developing software…such that some of these more niche markets, like private capital, could be opened up.”

Second, the industry relied on the wrong economic model. “Even at the high side and the most generous interpretation, there's maybe 30,000 managers out there globally. What is 300,000 total users out of hundreds of millions of knowledge workers globally? It's just not a market that you would focus on.” The tech industry’s traditional per-seat pricing made the private markets look small and unattractive, masking the true opportunity: fees tied to assets under management. The real value, Robinson explained, was never in user count—it was in capital complexity.

Third, operational excellence simply wasn’t a priority. Historically, GPs have been rewarded for investment judgment and relationships, not for how efficiently their firms run. As fund administration was increasingly outsourced, data became fragmented, and technology decisions were secondary. Meanwhile, Robinson added, “the private markets don't trade on exchanges, so the regulator plays no role in information sharing between GPs and LPs. You have a multi-party system with tens of thousands of GPs and LPs, and it's up to them to figure it out. You have this incredible complexity of data, standards, and information exchange that made the private markets much more difficult to crack and slower to adopt technology.”

As the private markets scale and diversify, the old operating model no longer holds. Fragmentation between software, data, and service providers creates risk, slows decision-making, and degrades the LP experience.

“The challenge that GPs have historically had is that all of their technology infrastructure, data, and service providers are disconnected. They buy a point solution for one problem, another for a second, and another for the third. None of those solutions talk to each other. Data, infrastructure, warehouses, databases, etc., are separate from the applications they use, and they have a network of service providers, because GPs often have many fund administrators, not just one. It's this huge mess of disconnection.”

A next-generation fund administrator, Robinson argued, must solve that disconnection—not by offering software or service, but by delivering both through a shared system of record.

That means:

• Technology that structures fund and investor data from the start
• Embedded expertise that applies judgment where automation falls short
• A single operating foundation that supports fundraising, administration, reporting, and compliance

Two structural shifts are accelerating the need for a next-gen administrator faster than any regulatory mandate ever could.

First, AI is transforming how knowledge work happens. GPs must either refactor their operating models to take advantage of automation, insight generation, and scale, or be overtaken by those who do.

Retail and wealth capital represent the next growth frontier. Unlike institutional LPs, these investors bring higher volumes, greater regulatory scrutiny, and expectations shaped by public-market experiences: real-time data, transparency, and optional liquidity.

To survive both of these “tsunamis,” GPs need a fund operations partner who can help them scale AUM without increasing headcount. 

The right digital infrastructure lowers the cost of compliance, reporting, and access, meaning markets don’t just grow—they diversify.  Robinson offered a long-term vision and “yardsticks” for what the private markets could be once infrastructure friction has been removed:

• The 401(k) test: An average person—like Robinson’s sister, a dentist—should be able to buy a low-cost, diversified, multi-manager basket of private assets in her retirement account as easily as the S&P 500.
• The FICO score for managers: The industry needs a standardized, freely available way to assess manager track records, dramatically lowering the "bespoke" transaction costs of matchmaking.
• Frictionless liquidity: The ability to borrow against private positions or trade with near-zero friction, similar to public markets.

The private markets tolerated inefficiency for decades. That era is ending. As the industry scales, the real advantage is shifting from access to execution. Infrastructure is no longer background plumbing. It’s the mechanism through which strategy becomes reality.

The next decade will reward firms that treat fund operations as a source of operational alpha—and partner accordingly.