Somewhere in San Francisco, a software engineer is staring at a brokerage screen. Most of her net worth sits in one stock - the company that paid her in equity for six years. Selling means a capital gains bill big enough to ruin the mood at dinner. Holding means betting her future on a single ticker. Cache Financials exists for exactly this person, at exactly this moment of hesitation.
Who they are nowA modern brokerage for a very old problem
Cache calls itself "a modern brokerage for your large stock positions." That is a tidy phrase for something genuinely unusual: the company rebuilt the exchange fund, a tax-deferral structure that has existed for nearly a century, and made it run like a consumer fintech app. Since launching its first fund in March 2024, Cache has gathered more than $600 million in assets under management, with clients spanning roughly 30% of the Fortune 500. It is, by its own account, approaching profitability - a phrase you don't often hear from an 18-month-old fund manager.
"An exchange fund is essentially a bunch of people coming together and pooling all of their stocks in one particular fund."
- Cache, on the deceptively simple mechanic behind the whole thingConcentrated stock is a great problem to have
Technology companies hand out more than $350 billion in stock-based compensation every year. For employees and founders, that generosity curdles into a familiar trap: a position too large to ignore, too appreciated to sell cheaply, and too risky to keep. Diversifying the normal way means selling, and selling means taxes, sometimes a quarter or more of the gain handed to the IRS in a single April.
The wealthy already had an answer. Exchange funds let investors pool their concentrated holdings into a shared, diversified fund and walk away with a slice of the whole basket - without triggering a taxable sale. The catch: legacy providers demanded million-dollar minimums, charged fat fees, and onboarded clients about as often as the seasons changed. The tool worked beautifully. It just wasn't for you.
"Exchange funds have been used by billionaires for almost 100 years. Now hundred-thousand-aires can diversify and defer taxes too."
- The Cache pitch, minus the velvet ropeAn engineer who had the problem himself
Srikanth Narayan founded Cache in 2022 after stints in engineering and product leadership at Uber and Alphabet - which is to say, he held concentrated tech equity and felt the trap close personally. His bet was that the exchange fund's exclusivity was a software problem, not a law of nature. The structure was sound; the plumbing was just expensive and slow. Rebuild the plumbing, and the velvet rope falls.
Investors agreed. Cache raised an $8.5 million seed in 2023, then a $12.5 million Series A in August 2025 led by First Round Capital at a $125 million post-money valuation. More than 60 angels piled in, including former Autodesk CEO Amar Hanspal, Aspiriant founder Tim Kochis, Bridge founder Zach Abrams, and DoorDash's Brian Hale. The cap table reads like a guest list of people who have, at some point, had this exact problem.
The Cache difference, in plain terms
- Minimum slashed from roughly $1,000,000 to $100,000 - a 10x wider door.
- Fees of about 0.4%-0.95% versus the 1.5%-2.5% common at legacy providers.
- The first exchange fund built on the Nasdaq-100, later joined by S&P 500 funds.
- Biweekly onboarding instead of the usual quarterly wait.
- Roughly 99% correlation to the target index - you diversify, your return profile barely flinches.
Diversify the position, keep the upside, defer the tax
Here is the move. An investor contributes her concentrated stock to a Cache Exchange Fund. In return she receives an interest in a diversified, index-tracking portfolio. Because she swapped rather than sold, there is no immediate capital gains event - the tax is deferred, potentially for years. The fund, meanwhile, is engineered to hug its benchmark closely, so she trades single-stock risk for broad-market exposure without quietly giving up the growth she signed up for.
Cache has extended the idea beyond a single product. There's a Collar Advance for clients who want liquidity against a concentrated position without selling it, and a dedicated platform, Cache for Advisors, that lets wealth managers and RIAs offer the same machinery to their own clients. The funds are independent entities owned by their investors; Cache keeps little to no stake in them.
"Diversify without a giant tax bill."
- The company's own four-word summary, which is admittedly hard to improve onFrom idea to $600M, in about three years
Cache is founded
Srikanth Narayan, fresh off product and engineering roles at Uber and Alphabet, starts the company after living the concentrated-stock problem himself.
$8.5M seed round
Early backing, including Quiet Capital, at roughly a $30M valuation. The bet: the exchange fund is a software problem.
First fund launches
Cache ships the first exchange fund built on the Nasdaq-100, with custody at BNY Mellon and a $100,000 minimum.
S&P 500 funds arrive
The lineup expands with S&P 500 and S&P 500 Growth benchmarked funds, broadening the menu beyond tech-heavy indices.
$12.5M Series A
First Round Capital leads at a $125M post-money valuation, with 60+ angels. AUM crosses $600M; the company reports it is approaching profitability.
The numbers do the arguing
The clearest case for Cache isn't rhetoric, it's the gap between what legacy exchange funds charged and what Cache charges - and who that gap lets in. The chart below stacks Cache's entry minimum against the traditional standard. The door didn't open a crack. It came off the hinges.
Who gets to use an exchange fund?
Minimum investment to participate (USD)
A 10x lower bar to entry. Translation: the thing your richest friend's family office used quietly now fits a senior engineer's stock grant. Bars are scaled to the minimum, which is the whole point of the story.
Behind the price, there's traction. About 90% of Cache clients are using an exchange fund for the first time - meaning Cache isn't stealing share so much as inventing a market. The average client invests north of $900,000 and defers more than $750,000 in capital gains. Alumni of Netflix, DoorDash, and Reddit are among the early believers.
The partnershipsBoring infrastructure, on purpose
Selling a tax-deferral product to skeptical, high-net-worth strangers requires trust, and trust here is spelled with old institutions. Client assets are custodied at BNY Mellon, the longest continuously operating bank in the United States. NAV Consulting administers the funds. Cache Securities and Cache Advisors are registered with the SEC as a broker-dealer and an investment adviser, and accounts carry SIPC protection up to $500,000 plus additional private insurance. None of this is exciting. That is exactly the appeal.
"Cache made a 100-year-old tax tool feel like opening a checking account - then parked the assets at a 240-year-old bank to prove it was serious."
- The trust trade, summarizedTaking the velvet rope down
Cache's stated mission is to bring the sophisticated financial products historically reserved for the ultra-wealthy to everyone holding a large stock position - starting with the exchange fund and, presumably, not ending there. The Collar Advance and the advisor platform hint at a broader ambition: become the default toolkit for anyone whose net worth is trapped inside a single ticker. The exchange fund is the wedge, not the whole plan.
Five things worth knowing
- The exchange fund structure is nearly 100 years old; Cache's innovation is access, not invention.
- The funds aim for ~99% index correlation, so diversifying barely changes your return profile.
- Onboarding runs biweekly - quick by an industry that thinks in quarters.
- The founder built it after wrestling with his own concentrated equity from Uber and Alphabet.
- Assets sit at BNY Mellon, a bank older than the U.S. Constitution.
The trap isn't going away
As long as companies pay talent in equity - and $350 billion a year says they will - people will keep accumulating positions too big to hold safely and too expensive to sell. The concentrated-stock problem is structural, recurring, and growing. Cache is betting that the fix shouldn't require a million dollars and a private banker. If it's right, the exchange fund stops being a footnote in estate-planning seminars and becomes a checkbox in the financial life of ordinary high earners.
Back to that engineer staring at her screen. The position is still too big, the tax still too painful, the single-ticker bet still too scary. What's changed is that the way out is no longer behind a velvet rope. She qualifies. She always had the problem; now she has the tool. That's the entire company, sitting in one screen-lit hesitation - and the click that follows it.
Find Cache
Official channels, filings & coverage