alternative-investments
(55)
Yieldstreet opened the door. Who holds the keys?
Now called Willow Wealth, the private markets platform has moved from picking individual deals to building portfolios. Its history explains why easier access still demands difficult questions.
Carry turns a one-person business into its own benefits department
The solo entrepreneur gets the invoices, the freedom and the retirement paperwork. Carry puts the financial machinery in one place - and its move to Lettuce makes the ambition larger.
SUBSCRIBE found the bottleneck in private markets. It was the paperwork.
Private funds learned to reach more investors. SUBSCRIBE built the machinery to handle them: reusable investor profiles, digital subscriptions, and a shared workflow for everyone who has to say yes.
First Rate and the Trouble with a Beautiful Number
An investment return looks simple until someone has to explain it. First Rate has built a business around the data, decisions, and human relationships hiding behind the percentage sign.
A-Rod Corp puts fame to work. The rent came first.
Alex Rodriguez built his investment business around apartment buildings, then added startups, sports teams and a media operation. Its most revealing deals show both the value of a famous name and the limits of one.
How Oxane Partners Put $1.5 Trillion of Private Credit on One Screen
Private credit grew faster than its plumbing. Oxane Partners built the control room - software, analysts and all - for the documents, covenants and awkward loan data that spreadsheets can no longer contain.
The $1.5 Billion Data Room That Wants to Run the Whole Deal
Intralinks helped replace couriers, binders and guarded rooms with a browser. Thirty years later, it is betting that security, workflow and AI can turn that original wedge into the operating system for high-stakes finance.
Allvue Tried to Go Public. Then It Found a Bigger Prize in Private-Market Data
The private-markets software company withdrew a $275 million IPO, stayed private and kept building. Now its advantage may be the data exhaust of 21,000 funds - if it can turn old workflows into trusted AI.
Dynamo Built the Everything Machine for Private Markets - Then Had to Make It Feel Simple
For 28 years, Dynamo kept adding the jobs private-market firms wanted software to do. Its biggest redesign asks a harder question: can one sprawling investment platform finally behave like one product?
CAIS Built a $2 Billion Business Out of Wall Street's Least Glamorous Problem
Independent advisors wanted private markets. What they lacked was the institutional plumbing. CAIS spent 17 years assembling access, diligence, education and paperwork into one operating system - and turned the boring middle into a company valued above $2 billion.
Newport Put the Family Balance Sheet Before the Portfolio - and Turned Private Markets Into a $6 Billion Pitch
Most wealth firms begin with a portfolio. Newport begins with the family - then builds an endowment-style mix of public and private assets around the life that money is supposed to fund.
The Family Office That Put a 300-Client Ceiling on a $26 Billion Problem
Prime Quadrant started after one family discovered that a liquidity event can buy almost anything except unbiased advice. Now the firm serves more than 260 families, caps the roster near 300, and wants to manage the arguments around wealth as carefully as the assets themselves.
A Bad First Deal Cost Him Everything. Lynx Equity’s Answer: Buy Boring Businesses and Never Sell.
Brad Nathan’s first deal wiped him out. His second act was built on a less cinematic idea: buy sturdy companies from retiring owners, read the balance sheet, and keep the good parts intact.
True North Built a $5.86 Billion Wealth Firm by Refusing to Sell the Usual Stuff
Scott Wood and Mark Gehlbach left product-tied Wall Street advice behind, built the alternative-investment shelf they wished existed, and waited 24 years before taking outside capital. Now comes the harder trick: scaling a family office without turning trust into a product.
North Square Built the Sales Engine Boutique Fund Managers Couldn’t - Then a $160 Billion Giant Came Calling
North Square made a business out of the least romantic part of asset management: getting good strategies onto advisers’ shelves. Eight years, several acquisitions and $4.05 billion in retail fund assets later, its distribution machine belongs to Azimut.
The Man Who Turned Corn Fields Into a $1.85 Billion Asset Class
Perry Vieth left a $7 billion bond desk to buy dirt. Eighteen years later, corn and soybean acres he leases to family farmers are worth $1.85 billion - and Wall Street finally wants in.
The Chicago Firm That Sold Wall Street's Playbook to Families Who Aren't Endowments
Two Chicago traders spent a decade turning hedge-fund tactics into a wealth business for families who aren't endowments. In 2026 they sold it - $5.6 billion later.
Sway Capital Wants to Be More Than a VC Firm - It Wants to Build the Whole Capital Stack
The firm that backed early technology companies is assembling venture, credit, impact and media under one roof. Its wager is that the useful edge is not a single fund, but the ability to meet an idea at several points in its life.
The $60 Billion Firm That Treats Private Equity Like Company Building
New Mountain Capital built a multi-strategy investment platform around a deceptively simple filter: choose businesses people still need when the economy gets strange, then help those businesses grow.
Linqto Built a $1,000 Door Into Unicorns. Then the Door Jammed.
Linqto turned private-company investing into something that looked almost like online shopping. Its rise - and its Chapter 11 restructuring - shows both the appeal and the hidden plumbing of fintech access.
EquityZen Built a Waiting Room for the IPO - Then Morgan Stanley Bought the Door
For 13 years, EquityZen has turned startup stock - awkward, restricted and stubbornly illiquid - into something more people can transact. Its new owner, Morgan Stanley, is betting that the private market needs plumbing as much as it needs picks.
Apollo Built a Trillion-Dollar Machine on the Boring Middle of the Balance Sheet
It started as a distressed-debt shop picking through the wreckage of the 1990 junk-bond collapse. Thirty-five years later Apollo runs close to a trillion dollars and is trying to sell private credit to your 401(k).
The Atlanta firm quietly building a private-markets operating system for your financial advisor
For years, private markets belonged to endowments and the ultra-wealthy. BIP Capital is betting the next chapter belongs to the advisor down the street - and it built the plumbing to prove it.
The Firm That Bet on Boring and Made $41 Billion
Founded in 1984, Kayne Anderson built a $41 billion alternatives platform by specializing in the unglamorous middle market - oil wells, storage units, and student housing - where cash flow, not hype, does the talking.
The Cap-Intro Business Was Built on Handshakes. iConnections Turned It Into Software.
A pandemic side project for charity became the meeting place for hedge funds, private equity and the allocators who fund them - roughly 26,000 members and $50 trillion in capital, run on software instead of steak dinners.
The Firm That Buys Companies Nobody Wants - and a Football Club Everybody Watches
Clearlake turned a distressed-debt strategy into a $90 billion machine by fixing unglamorous companies - then bought a Premier League club to prove the point.
The $10 Door Into Wall Street's Private Room
Fundrise started by letting neighbors buy a piece of a Washington property. It now manages billions across real estate, credit and venture - an ambitious attempt to give ordinary investors institutional-style access without pretending private assets are as simple as stocks.
StepStone Group and the Business of Getting Into Rooms Most Investors Never See
A private markets firm started in 2007 now helps steer roughly $700 billion across private equity, credit, real estate and infrastructure - and it is quietly opening the door to individual investors.
QC Capital Is Betting on the Boring Infrastructure of Daily Life
Car washes, oil-change bays and small industrial buildings rarely make glamorous pitch decks. QC Capital thinks that is precisely why they deserve a closer look.
The Firm That Built a Resale Market for Private Equity
Jeremy Coller spent 36 years arguing that private equity needed a second-hand market. Now that the market is worth trillions, EQT is paying up to $3.7 billion to own the firm that started it.