Bunch raises $15.5M for its platform that simplifies investment management for VCs

While public market investors have a wide range of infrastructure and software to help them track, analyze, and manage their investments, the same is not true for investors in private companies, such as venture capitalists. Indeed, many private market investors must manage information about their investments and feed it into a multitude of back-office systems, and often do so manually.

However, there are several platforms that make this task easier – notably Apax, Vistra, IQEQ and Carta dominate the investment management market.

The newcomer, the Berlin-based group, wants to make it easier for investors to manage, administer and transact their investments in private markets and has just raised $15.5 million in a Series A round to continue building out its platform. The startup has raised a total of $22 million to date and says private funds currently manage around €2 billion in assets through its platform.

The Series A round was led by FinTech Collective.

With the IPO window more or less closed for the past few years, private markets have been growing by default as investors look for liquidity and opportunities to buy or sell shares in hot startups. As we saw in March, in the absence of IPOs, investors have increasingly turned to secondary markets, where private companies can authorize their shareholders to sell a limited number of shares to approved investors. Secondary market transactions have grown from $35 billion in 2017 to $105 billion in 2021 and are expected to total $138 billion in 2023 when year-end results are due, according to Industry Ventures.

The alternative asset market is expected to be worth nearly $40 trillion by the end of the decade, and the private markets data sector is expected to be worth $18 billion by 2030.

However, much of the private investment sector relies on relatively older platforms.

Founded in late 2021 by Levent Altunel and Enrico Ohnemüller, Bunch is a venture capital and private equity firm. The platform enables investors to store private market data points, access up-to-date information, automate workflows, and conduct pre- and post-closing services.

In a phone interview, Levent Altunel told TechCrunch, “Currently, VCs operate almost like accountants and bookkeepers, doing manual things like transferring data to and from Excel or PDFs. We automate and digitize that experience into a workflow that fundamentally reduces the number of mistakes you can make and reduces the number of man hours it takes. That frees up fund managers to focus on fundraising or actually investing.”

“In an industry that closely resembles the public markets of the 1980s, BUCK is changing the game for GPs and LPs in private markets,” Toby Triebel, partner at FinTech Collective, said in a statement.

Existing investors Cherry Ventures, Motive Ventures, Broadhaven Ventures and TinyVC, the firm of Philipp Moehring, former head of AngelList Europe, participated in the round. Angel investors including the founders and directors of Klarna, Moonfare and Kinnevik also invested.