institutional-investors
(37)
Jennifer Choi and the power of a better question
Before she became ILPA’s CEO, Jennifer Choi built databases, reporting standards and a collective voice for private equity’s investors. Her work asks a deceptively simple question: can the people supplying the money see what happens to it?
Ryan Baird and the price of staying in the room
From a shrinking trading edge to a social app in the Philippines, Ryan Baird has worked where money meets behavior. At Baird Augustine, he is returning to a business principle he learned at home: relationships take time.
Roy Salsinha and the first $20,000
A loan from his parents helped Roy Salsinha start Carmo Companies in a basement. A decade later, his work still turns on a personal question: who needs to meet whom?
Orchard Platform built the plumbing. Who would open the taps?
Online lenders made borrowing faster. Orchard Platform tried to make their loans easier for institutions to buy, compare and trade. Its most revealing lesson arrived when the data business became a marketplace.
Aurigin wants your next deal to begin with a better introduction
In private markets, the right person is often outside your address book. Aurigin combines algorithms, banking analysts and mutual consent to make that introduction without announcing your business to the world.
PineGap.ai wants Wall Street to get its thinking time back
The equity research startup turns a fund’s recurring chores into custom AI agents. Its wager: the useful intelligence is in knowing how an analyst actually works.
Tetrix found the missing context in private markets
The first AI tool made fund documents faster to read. The harder, more useful job was connecting them - so investors could see what they actually owned.
HomeLend wants to make buying mortgages less of a mortgage
A mortgage investor needs more than money. HomeLend supplies the machinery that turns a buying decision into a completed loan purchase - and gives lenders more places to sell.
The Investor List That Refused to Stay a List
International Elite Capital spent a decade treating investor relations as bespoke craft. Now it is trying to bottle what it learned - without losing the judgment that made the work useful.
The Investor Meeting Is Won Before Anyone Enters the Room
Taylor Rafferty has spent four decades arguing that investor relations is not a volume business. The useful work happens earlier: choosing a measurable goal, finding the investors who might care, and teaching executives to answer the question they wish had not been asked.
The Small Firm Translating Bitcoin and AI for Wall Street
OG Advisory Group found a lucrative gap between fast-moving technology and slow-moving investor language. Its answer is a compact, specialist team that turns miners, data centers and digital-asset platforms into stories the public markets can follow.
Transpose Platform backs the people who back the founders
A venture firm with about $2.65 billion under management has two ways into the next startup: invest in its founders, or back the fund that finds them. Transpose Platform makes a business of doing both.
ROTH Capital Partners knows who should be in the room
The growth-company investment bank turns research and investor introductions into financing opportunities. A $25 million share offering shows what that access can cost; its history shows what access cannot fix.
Preqin’s £2.5 billion business: knowing what private money is doing
Preqin built a business answering the questions private markets prefer to leave complicated. Now BlackRock is putting its data inside the software investors use to choose funds, measure returns and follow the money.
Clearwater’s $8.4 billion bet on getting the numbers right
Investment accounting made Clearwater indispensable to finance teams. Now, with Enfusion, Beacon and new private owners, it wants a bigger job: connecting the trade to the final report.
The Private-Equity Firm That Treats South America as Four Different Markets
Victoria Capital Partners does not sell a single Latin America story. Its bet is more practical: follow each country’s cycle, take a seat where decisions are made, and use regional experience to turn local companies into sturdier platforms.
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 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 Firm That Bet Against the Buyout Playbook - and Ran It 40 Years
For four decades, a Beverly Hills firm has invested in middle-market companies by lending and owning at the same time. In July 2025 it closed its seventh flagship fund at over $3.6 billion - proof the contrarian model still sells.
The Boston Firm That Buys Into Everyone Else's Funds - and Manages $161 Billion Doing It
It started in 1982 as an insurer's venture arm with two employees and $200 million. Four decades later, HarbourVest sits on roughly $161 billion and a simple idea: you don't have to pick the winners if you own the whole board.
The Club Turning Unicorn Headlines Into Private-Market Deals
Silicon Valley Investclub built a newsletter thousands of investors read for the funding rounds - and a chaperoned marketplace where they can actually buy in. The name says Menlo Park; the incorporation papers say Tortola.
Beds, Sheds and the Quiet Business of Rebuilding European Cities
MARK Capital Management turns tired warehouses, faded arcades and half-empty city blocks into logistics hubs and mixed-use districts. Its 'beds and sheds' strategy just won Logistics Investor of the Year.
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.
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.
The Landlord Betting That America Still Needs to Buy Milk in Person
While the internet was busy declaring the shopping center dead, a West Palm Beach firm quietly assembled 14 million square feet of the stuff - and keeps selling it at a profit.
The firm that invented the private-equity fund-of-funds is still here 50 years later
Half a century ago it started as a bank's growth-equity desk. Today Adams Street runs about $73 billion in private markets - and every dollar of it is owned by the people who work there.
Carmo Companies Sells the Most Valuable Seat in Private Markets
The New York firm does not manage the money. It designs the room where money managers and allocators can finally meet - then sells access with unusual precision.
Blackstone
It started with $400,000 and two guys who couldn't raise a fund. Four decades later, Blackstone manages $1.35 trillion and quietly owns the warehouses, apartments and data centers powering the AI boom.
Victory Capital
How a management buyout out of a Cleveland bank turned into a $300-billion-plus asset manager that collects boutiques the way other firms collect logos.
Cohesion
Cohesion is a New York-based Y Combinator (P26) startup building AI agents that automate research for institutional investors. Its agentic teammate monitors the companies an analyst covers - tracking earnings, news, and non-traditional datasets like podcasts and X/Twitter - and surfaces differentiated insights purpose-built for public equity investing. Founded by ex-hedge-fund analyst Devon Krapcho with engineers from AWS and T. Rowe Price, Cohesion is already live with 10+ long/short and long-only fundamental funds managing a combined $10B+ in assets.