Michael Pusateri sells picks and shovels to people who mine collateralized loan obligations. This is not the fintech story you see on a magazine cover. There is no debit card, no neobank interface, no glossy campaign in an airport. There is a Dallas office, a Houston office as of this year, and a growing list of CLO managers and private credit funds who pay Siepe to reconcile the loan tapes, warehouse the reference data, model the waterfalls, and make sure the operational due diligence meeting on Thursday morning goes better than the one last quarter.
Siepe is Italian for hedge. Pusateri chose it in 2012, when he left a run of chief-technology jobs inside hedge funds - HBK Investments, then Highland Capital Management, then Carlson Capital - and decided that the software the buy-side needed was going to be built by someone who had lived on the buy-side, not by someone who had raised a seed round in a coworking space. The bet has taken twelve years and produced a company with 120 employees, roughly $33 million in total funding, and a $30 million Series B led by WestCap in August 2024. The bet is still on.
The Product Is the Boring Part
Siepe's marketing keywords, which the company has helpfully supplied to a data broker, include phrases like "loan and security reference data," "collateral administration," "trade and settlement data," and "first-time CLO issuer solutions." This is not a company that has to worry about being confused with a consumer brand. The customer base is CLO managers, private credit funds, fund administrators, hedge funds, family offices, and asset managers of the kind that measure their working day in basis points and their weekend in position reconciliation exceptions.
What Siepe sells them is a combination of software and managed services: an investment management platform that runs front-to-back through a book, plus an outsourced team that will actually run it. The pitch is a two-part answer to a two-part problem. The technology is expensive to build. The people to run the technology are expensive to hire. Siepe does both, and charges less than doing either one in-house would cost. This is not a novel argument in enterprise software. Pusateri's version of it happens to be aimed at a segment - alternative credit - that spent the last decade going from clubby to enormous.
"Our mission is to help credit managers better leverage their data to reduce operational risk and increase alpha."- Michael Pusateri, on the 2024 WestCap round
From Highland to Founder
Before Siepe, Pusateri was the CTO at Carlson Capital and, before that, CTO and co-COO at Highland Capital Management, where he served from roughly 2006 to 2010. Before Highland he did database and web development at HBK Investments. Before all of that he had a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Tulsa, class of 1993, which is the kind of resume detail that reads as a mistake until you look at it more carefully. Mechanical engineering teaches you tolerances, feedback loops, and the fact that everything in a real system is measured, imperfect, and eventually the operator's problem. This is a useful mental model for someone who is going to spend three decades in financial infrastructure.
The transition point in his own telling is that during the years at Highland and Carlson he sat in more than two hundred investor presentations and operational due diligence meetings. Two hundred is not a rhetorical number. It is what a hedge fund CTO does when the fund is raising capital, when an existing LP is renewing, when a fund of funds is doing its annual review. In each of those meetings someone across the table asks: how do you get your data, where does it live, who has the credentials, what happens on a Friday afternoon when the vendor's API dies. Pusateri answered those questions until he understood the shape of the answer better than the questioners did. Then he started a company to sell the answer.
What WestCap Bought
WestCap, the growth firm founded by Laurence Tosi, wrote the check that led the August 2024 round. WestCap is not a fintech tourist. They know infrastructure businesses and they know the arithmetic of managed services. What they bought, according to the press materials, was a company that had already added $7.7 billion in new assets under administration in the first half of 2024, that had onboarded two new front-office software clients running $80 billion and $6 billion in AUM respectively, and that had grown its headcount 56% over two years. The Series B included the appointment of Mark Schultis, an industry veteran from SE2 and IHS Markit, as president. Pusateri kept the CEO title and the board chair role.
The convergence of liquid and private credit is Pusateri's public thesis, and it is the reason he keeps hiring senior credit-industry executives. In an April 2025 leadership announcement he framed it plainly: private credit is starting to look like liquid credit, both markets need better data, and the manager who can operate across both without an army of analysts is the manager who wins. Siepe is the software that lets them operate across both.
"Data without context is just data, data with context is value."- Michael Pusateri, "Insights" blog, December 2020
The Sentence He Repeats
Founders develop stock phrases. Pusateri's is the "context" line, which he first published in a Siepe blog post in December 2020 and has repeated in interviews since. It is a slightly dressed-up version of an old data-warehousing truism, and it does a lot of work for the company. It explains why Siepe insists on owning the ingestion layer and the reference data alongside the reporting tools. It explains why the company keeps hiring managed-services staff rather than positioning itself as a pure software vendor. And it explains why WestCap and the earlier investors were comfortable underwriting a business whose competitive moat is, in a sense, the accumulated tribal knowledge of the CLO middle office.
He sold the plumbing. Private credit needed the plumbing.
The trade, one sentence.Awards, Buildings, and Other Evidence
The 2019 EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Southwest finalist listing was the first public marker. In 2021 the A-Team Innovation Awards named Pusateri Most Innovative Financial Technology Executive, the sort of award that industry insiders take seriously and outsiders have never heard of. Siepe itself won Best Third-Party Technology Vendor IT Team at the 2021 American Financial Technology Awards. In 2025 the company appeared as a finalist in the Dallas Innovates / D CEO Innovation Awards and was named to the Dallas 100 Entrepreneur Awards. The Houston office opened the same year, an expansion aimed less at the energy money that usually drives Dallas-to-Houston moves and more at the private credit managers concentrated along the Katy Freeway.
Path
- 1993Graduates University of Tulsa, B.S. Mechanical Engineering.
- 1995Begins software developer career.
- 2006-10CTO and co-COO, Highland Capital Management, Dallas.
- 2010sCTO, Carlson Capital.
- 2012Founds Siepe in Dallas.
- 2019EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Southwest finalist.
- 2021A-Team Most Innovative Financial Technology Executive.
- 2024$30M Series B led by WestCap; Mark Schultis named president.
- 2025Houston office opens; Dallas 100 Entrepreneur Award.
What The Numbers Say
Quirks
Siepe is not the only company named after a European hedge, but it may be the only one that means to. Pusateri picked the word because it was short, ownable, and contained a joke that only clients would get. His day-to-day still runs out of a Dallas office building on Harvest Hill Road, the same city where he did his three preceding chief-technology jobs. He has spent his entire adult career, more or less, inside a five-mile radius of the same set of hedge fund campuses. The engineering degree from Tulsa remains the only formal training he has in either of the two disciplines - finance, software - that pay his salary.
The Ask, In His Words
"The increasing convergence of private credit with liquid credit is creating a more complex landscape for managers, driving demand for solutions that can simplify and provide actionable data insights."- Michael Pusateri, April 2025
That is the entire investment thesis, delivered in one sentence for a press release. The complication is real. The demand is real. Whether Siepe becomes the default vendor for that demand or gets absorbed into a bigger platform in the next cycle is the question Pusateri is answering, quarter by quarter, out of a Dallas office with a growing Texas footprint.
Elsewhere
FAQ
Who is Michael Pusateri?
The CEO and founder of Siepe, a Dallas fintech serving CLO managers, private credit funds and hedge funds. He started the company in 2012.
What does Siepe do?
Software and managed services for alternative investment managers: data management, portfolio management, reconciliation, reporting, front-to-back operations.
What did he do before Siepe?
CTO at Carlson Capital, CTO and co-COO at Highland Capital Management, and database and web development at HBK Investments in Dallas.
How much has Siepe raised?
Roughly $33 million total, including a $30 million Series B led by WestCap in August 2024.
Where did he go to school?
The University of Tulsa, B.S. Mechanical Engineering, 1993.