Making Private Markets Better

Today, anyone can open up their phone, open a brokerage account, and invest in a broad selection of companies across the world. The public markets have seen significant advancement over time, enabled by technology. The markets have become so efficient that trade commissions have come down to zero in recent years.

The private markets? Not so much.

The term “private markets” essentially encapsulates any private investment. Consider the case where someone finds an opportunity to purchase a building and decides to raise money from family and friends to complete the purchase. Each investor’s ownership, likely determined by each investor’s contributions, would likely be recorded in a spreadsheet or similar tool.

This illustrative, somewhat-contrived example is quite representative of how many private equity firms operate. Investment firms managing millions, even billions, of assets under management operate their businesses with spreadsheets.

This manual processing is costly. Every new investor requires additional handling, leading private equity firms to seek out more capital from fewer investors, in turn limiting opportunities for new participants.

For the same reason, reporting is a significant challenge. In the private markets, information is non-standard, cumbersome to access, often delayed, and possibly erroneous. While an investor with just $100 in the public market has access to comprehensive financial statements and up-to-date valuations, an investor with millions or billions under management may find themselves struggling to identify what they own.

At Juniper Square, we believe in a world where private markets operate more efficiently and transparently, ultimately making these investment opportunities more accessible and serving society through improving capital allocation. We believe in a world where investors can effortlessly scale in and out of positions in private markets, more akin to the public markets.

We began by building an investment management platform, empowering private equity firms to operate more efficiently and structure their data. We are working on bridging the gap between these firms and their investors, giving investors access to their data. Ultimately, we will build out a capital market offering, leveraging our platform to facilitate transactions, drive down costs, and build a more inclusive market.

We started on our path focusing on one asset class: commercial real estate. The solutions we’re building, such as our ownership graph, are applicable to other classes including private debt, buyout equity, infrastructure, amongst others.

We have a long runway ahead. We’re just getting started.