Gridline, an alternative investment tech platform launched in 2022, has raised $18.5 million in a Series A funding round led by financial technology venture firm FINTOP, bringing its total funding to $27.5 million.
Ardent Venture Partners and Tech Square Ventures also participated in the funding round.
Logan Henderson, co-founder and CEO of Gridline, said the company will use the funding to deepen the platform and expand the team across engineering, operations, investment solutions and sales.
The funding “reinforces our direction and allows us to scale what has been working over the last few years,” he said.
When Gridline launched in 2022, it set out to create an integrated suite to help private wealth firms build, manage and scale an alternative investments program.
“There’s obviously been a proliferation of tools within the private market spectrum, but there wasn’t an integrated platform that was really purpose-built for the wealth channel,” Henderson said. “So for us, that is exactly what we’ve designed and developed with Gridline is, how do you automate and bring efficiency, both from an administrative and an operational standpoint, to private wealth firms, and especially for those that are investing at scale on behalf of clients.”
Henderson said the firm is now moving from a core system of action to building intelligence and judgment into the pre- and post-investment workflow process. Gridline has invested heavily in AltComply, its AI-powered diligence capability, going live this quarter. AltComply automates document ingestion, standardizes analysis and surfaces key risks to help advisors evaluate private investments. It also helps advisors with cash-flow modeling and put together growth and pacing plans.
“Being able to make better, faster investment decisions, helping them structure bespoke products and customize solutions for their clients, managing the entirety of their existing book of business, providing insights on cash flows and when returns of capital are going to be there, and really unifying that full investment life cycle, rather than needing to bounce between different tools,” Henderson said. “If you can integrate that on one single solution and own the underlying data, that’s the power that firms ultimately need to unlock growth and alternatives.”
Gridline currently has more than 400 wealth management firms on the platform, including Keebeck Wealth Management, Nicholas Hoffman & Co. and Avidian Wealth Solutions. The firm currently manages over 50 different investment vehicles. The company has 23 employees and plans to grow to 30 this year.
To be sure, there are other alternative investment platforms focused squarely on serving retail financial advisors, such as CAIS, iCapital, Opto and SUBSCRIBE, among others. In addition, traditional TAMPs such as InvestCloud, Envestnet and others are increasingly adding private markets functionality or integrations with alts platforms.
But Henderson said the biggest differentiator is Gridline’s proprietary ledger. Instead of having to rely on third-party fund administrators or outside parties that are manually reconciling data, it’s all integrated into one system.
“What you’ve seen with other platforms is, they’ve acquired a series of solutions. So you have one brand, but you have different tools, and ultimately you create data silos, which creates operational risk and delays and information availability,” Henderson said.
“By owning the ledger and integrating capital activity, money movement, and reporting directly into the platform, we create a single source of truth where data is accurate, timely, and always available,” Henderson wrote in a note on Gridline’s website. “From there, workflows stay connected, reporting lag shrinks and insight compounds over time.”
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