He spent a quarter century pricing what the market couldn't. Then he built a machine to do it faster than he ever could.
Yann Magnan. Engineer by training, dealmaker by trade, founder by choice.
There is a number that mathematicians quietly adore. Seventy-three: the twenty-first prime, tidy and stubborn and, to a certain kind of mind, beautiful. Yann Magnan runs a company named after it. The rest of the name - Strings - is a nod to how computers store words. Put them together and you get 73 Strings, a company built on the belief that the messiest problem in finance is really a math problem wearing a disguise.
That problem is valuation. Not the valuation of a public stock, which the market prices every second of every day, but the valuation of the private stuff - the buyout stakes, the credit instruments, the growth-equity bets that trade rarely, report irregularly, and hide their true worth inside PDFs and email attachments and spreadsheets nobody wants to open. Roughly $17.6 trillion of the world's capital sits in these alternative assets. Most of it still gets valued by hand.
Magnan looked at that and did not see drudgery. He saw a mission worth restarting his career for.
73 Strings is an AI-powered platform that does three things for the private-capital industry: it extracts data from unstructured documents, it monitors portfolios, and it estimates fair value. The pitch is blunt and repeated often - calculations run ten times faster, costs fall by up to half, and the system claims 99% accuracy pulling numbers out of the kind of documents that give analysts headaches.
Under the hood sits a combination of optical character recognition and proprietary natural-language processing - software taught to read a credit agreement or a quarterly report the way a trained associate would, then structure what it finds. The product line carries names as literal as the company's: 73 Extract for the data, 73 Monitor for the analytics, 73 Value for the valuations.
The customers are the giants of alternative investment - asset managers overseeing trillions between them. And in a twist Magnan clearly enjoys, several of the firms that back the company also happen to be the firms that could use it.
Three modules, one loop: pull the numbers out of the documents, watch the portfolio breathe, and price what the market won't. SOC 1 and SOC 2 certified, because trillion-dollar clients ask.
Rewind to 1992. A young Magnan enrolls at Ecole Centrale Paris, one of France's elite engineering schools, and leaves with an MSc in engineering. He does not, however, go build bridges. He goes into finance, and specifically into the corner of it that engineers tend to like: valuation, where the answer is never obvious and the method matters as much as the result.
He becomes a partner at EY, heading the Western Europe valuation practice. Then, in 2007, he opens the Paris office of Duff & Phelps from a standing start. It grows. He grows with it. By 2016 he is the leader of the entire EMEA region and a member of the Global Operating Committee - responsible, at the peak, for 27 offices and more than 800 people across valuation, disputes, corporate finance, restructuring and tax.
It is the kind of résumé most people spend a lifetime protecting. And then two former colleagues, Abhishek Pandey and Sambeet Parija, called with an idea about automating the very craft he had mastered. In the middle of 2020, Magnan did the thing that experienced executives almost never do. He became a first-time founder.
The founding team - Magnan alongside Pandey, Vinod Vijapur and Parija - shares one unusual asset: they had all sat on the client side of the problem. They had advised alternative funds on valuation, wrestled with the late nights and the reconciliations, felt the ache of a process that ran on manual effort and institutional memory. When they describe their edge, they use the phrase "secret sauce," and they mean the decades of encoded know-how that lets the software behave less like a scraper and more like a seasoned associate.
That lived experience is why the accuracy claims land. It is one thing to build a machine that reads documents. It is another to build one that knows which numbers matter and why - and that knowledge came from careers, not code.
Trillions in private assets valued through spreadsheets, gut feel and exhausting manual review.
Robust fund-level numbers depend on robust company-level numbers. Fix the inputs, fix everything downstream.
Turn decades of advisory instinct into software that reads, monitors and values - at machine speed.
The February 2025 Series B was led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with continued backing from Blackstone Innovations Investments and participation from Golub Capital, Hamilton Lane and Broadhaven Ventures. It followed a Series A led by Blackstone and Fidelity International Strategic Ventures.
Look closely and the list reads like a roster of exactly the sort of firm 73 Strings is built to serve. That is not an accident. When the people who understand the problem best are willing to put money behind your answer to it, the endorsement is doubled - conviction and validation in the same wire transfer. Magnan has a two-word verdict on the arrangement.
Goldman Sachs Alternatives
Blackstone, Golub, Hamilton Lane, Broadhaven
"We can calculate valuations 10x faster and reduce costs by up to 50%, while achieving 99% data extraction accuracy."
"Valuation is such a tough digital problem to crack because there are so many parameters, data points, and nuances that get factored in."
"Fund level data is informed from company level data. The more robust the company level data, the more robust the fund level data will be."
"Smart capital is fantastic."
Magnan's ambition is not modest. He wants 73 Strings to become the default valuation-intelligence layer for the entire alternative-investment industry - the system of record that turns unstructured chaos into fair value, and does it fast enough to matter. His conference talks carry titles like "Beyond Excel: the future of valuations, reporting, and middle-office efficiency," which is about as close to a manifesto as a valuation executive gets.
The spreadsheet has ruled the middle office for forty years. Magnan spent most of his career living inside it. Now he is spending the rest of his career trying to make it obsolete.
Yann Magnan is the CEO and co-founder of 73 Strings, an AI-powered valuation and portfolio-monitoring platform for the private capital industry. A corporate-finance veteran of more than 25 years, he built Duff & Phelps' Paris office in 2007 and rose to lead its EMEA region across 27 offices before joining a pair of former colleagues to attack one of finance's most stubborn problems: pricing illiquid private assets. Under his leadership, 73 Strings raised a $55M Series B led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives in February 2025 and now serves managers overseeing trillions in assets from offices spanning Paris, New York, London, Bengaluru and beyond.
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