Strategy, not spreadsheets
Ross Mechanic runs Maybern, a New York company that does something deeply unglamorous and quietly enormous: it does the math behind private funds. Capital calls. Distributions. Management fees. Waterfall tiers with names only a fund accountant could love. The platform now tracks more than $80 billion in assets across over 150 fund vehicles, and in November 2025 it raised a $50 million Series B led by Battery Ventures. The pitch is one sentence long. Let the modern fund CFO lead with strategy, not spreadsheets.
The reason that sentence lands is that Mechanic spent years inside the spreadsheets. He is a software engineer by training, not a financier, and he arrived at private equity through the back door of code. What he found there was a problem hiding in plain sight - and a conviction that it was solvable.
Where the idea actually came from
Rewind to Cadre, the real estate investment platform where Mechanic landed straight out of the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. He started as a data engineering intern and worked his way up to staff engineer, eventually running the team that designed and built Cadre's fund accounting system from the ground up. That is an unusual vantage point. Most people who build fund software have never sat next to a fund accountant at month-end. Mechanic did.
What he saw was duplication. His engineering team and the firm's third-party fund administrators were performing the same calculations - capital calls, distributions, management fees - independently, then comparing notes to catch each other's errors. The single source of truth for investor data was not a database. It was roughly 100 spreadsheets.
Most engineers would have shrugged. Finance is messy; that is just how it is. Mechanic asked a sharper question, the one that became the intellectual seed of an entire company: was all this business logic so bespoke that it genuinely had to live in Excel? Or was the complexity, however large, fundamentally finite - finite enough that software could automate it?
That reframing matters. "Bespoke" means hopeless. "Finite" means buildable. He bet on finite.
The distinction is not academic. If every fund's logic is genuinely unique, then Excel is the right answer and always will be - you can only ever describe each fund by hand. But if the universe of capital-call mechanics, distribution waterfalls, management-fee schedules, and credit-facility math is large yet bounded, then it can be encoded once and reused forever. That is the difference between consulting and software, between a service that scales linearly with headcount and a product that scales with code. Mechanic's entire company rests on the second answer being true.
Is all this business logic so bespoke that it needs to happen in Excel, or is there a large universe of complexity, but fundamentally a finite one, such that we could build software to automate these calculations?Ross Mechanic, on the question that started Maybern
Before he built anything, he went looking for proof. He left Cadre to become an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Human Capital, where he spent his time researching proptech and the operational guts of private fund businesses. The diagnosis kept repeating: managers had a difficult relationship with their fund administrators, and they were catching errors a lot of the time. In July 2021, he founded Maybern.
An operating system for fund finance
Maybern automates financial and operational data management for closed-end private funds, the kind that run into the billions and historically lived in Excel. It replaces fragmented spreadsheets with a unified system that handles the complex calculations, cuts the error rate, and produces audit-ready reporting. The company calls the result a "performance book of record" - a single, governed, traceable record of how a fund is actually doing.
The strategic choice underneath the product is the interesting part. Most startups attack the easy end of a market first - the small, simple customers - and work upward. Mechanic did the opposite. He started upmarket, on purpose, running design partnerships with firms managing $200 billion to $250 billion in assets. The logic: if you can model the most complex fund structures in existence, everything below that is downhill. Solving the hard case first becomes the moat.
It is also a bet about the future of AI in finance. Mechanic's view is that you cannot bolt intelligence onto chaos. Agents and automated workflows are only as trustworthy as the data beneath them. Build the governed, transparent foundation first, and the AI becomes reliable. Skip it, and you are automating mistakes faster.
The founding bench
- Ross Mechanic - Co-founder & CEO. Ex-staff engineer, Cadre.
- Ashwin Raghu - Co-founder & CTO. Former CTO of Cadre; ran data engineering at Instagram NY.
- Tiffany Simonsen - Client Experience. 12 years at Goldman Sachs; CPA.
- Marcus Ryu - Board, via Battery. Co-founder & former CEO of Guidewire.
Why this market is worth the trouble
Private funds are not a niche. They are a $16 trillion industry projected to double to $32 trillion by 2030. Maybern is building the plumbing underneath that growth.
Bars are illustrative, scaled for comparison. Figures per Maybern and industry estimates, 2025.
Eight years, one through-line
We're building the back and middle-office infrastructure that gives managers governance, transparency, and traceability - the data foundation that makes AI reliable for private markets.Ross Mechanic, on Maybern's Series B
An engineer's temperament
You can read Mechanic in the way he frames things. A fund accountant sees an impossible thicket of edge cases. He sees a finite set of rules that haven't been written down properly yet. That instinct - to look at chaos and insist it has structure - is the engineer's superpower, and it is the throughline from his open-source days to his pitch decks.
He is, in fact, a working open-source contributor. His GitHub carries work on projects including django-simple-history, a Python library for tracking changes to database records over time. There is a quiet irony there: years before Maybern, he was already building tools to keep an immutable, traceable history of how data changed. A "performance book of record" is the same idea, scaled to the trillions.
He joined Twitter back in December 2015, while still an undergraduate. He keeps his public persona tight and on-message - cofounder/CEO of Maybern, EIR at Human Capital, staff engineer at Cadre, Penn grad. No noise. The signal is the work.
And the work has a personality. Starting upmarket with $250 billion firms is not the cautious move. It is the move of someone who believes the hardest problem is the only one worth solving, because solving it makes everything else trivial by comparison.
There is a pattern in how he talks about the company, too. He does not describe Maybern as a tool, a plugin, or a faster Excel. He describes it as infrastructure and as a new category. That choice of words is deliberate. Tools get bought and forgotten. Infrastructure gets built on. He is positioning Maybern as the layer everything else in a fund's operations eventually depends on - the back and middle office made dependable enough that the rest of the business can stop worrying about it.
It is worth noting how rare his vantage point is. The fintech graveyard is full of founders who understood finance but could not ship software, and engineers who could ship but never sat through a month-end close. Mechanic is one of the few who did both, in the same building, on the same problem. He built the system, then watched the people who used it, then left to build it properly for everyone. That sequence - feel the pain, study the pain, solve the pain - is the unfashionable, durable way to start a company.
What he has built so far
Founded Maybern
Co-founded and leads the company defining a new category of fund management software.
$50M Series B
Led by Battery Ventures, bringing total raised to roughly $76M across rounds.
$80B+ in AUM
The platform supports more than 150 fund vehicles and grew 4.6x year over year.
Built a fund system
As staff engineer, designed and built Cadre's fund accounting system from the ground up.
Code in the wild
Contributor to projects like django-simple-history - traceable history, long before Maybern.
BSE, Computer Science
University of Pennsylvania engineering, the foundation under everything that followed.
Things worth knowing
- His one-line thesis - that fund accounting is "finite, not bespoke" - is the entire company compressed into four words.
- He recruited Cadre's former CTO, who had previously run data engineering at Instagram's New York office, as his co-founder.
- The market he picked is projected to grow from $16 trillion to $32 trillion by 2030 - so the tailwind is real.
- He went after the biggest, most complex funds first. Most founders run the other way.
- Battery's bet came with Marcus Ryu, who took Guidewire through exactly this kind of enterprise transformation, joining the board.
Where this is going
Mechanic is clear that the spreadsheet replacement is the floor, not the ceiling. Once a fund is perfectly modeled in software, the interesting work starts: scenario modeling, intelligent decision support, and the agentic workflows that need a clean data foundation to be trustworthy at all.
Creating a perfect model of a fund in software is only the first step.Ross Mechanic
The ambition is not to make a better spreadsheet. It is to make the spreadsheet unnecessary - to become the operating system that private capital runs on. Eighty billion dollars of assets already agree.
Find Ross & Maybern
Profile compiled from public sources. Facts verifiable as of June 2026.