Private Markets Startup Attracts Venture Funding

Silicon Valley Bank parent SVB Financial Group has led a round of venture financing for Aumni, a company that seeks to help private capital investors track performance and analyze data from investment agreements.

Aumni said Tuesday that it received $10 million of series A financing from SVB Financial, Moneta Ventures, Next Frontier Capital, Quiet Ventures, Kickstart Seed Fund, Blackhorn Ventures, Prelude, and Service Provider Capital. Moneta, Next Frontier, and Quiet Ventures had seeded the company with $3.7 million of funding. 

The startup was founded by former corporate attorneys Anthony Lewis and Kelsey Chase to solve “a common pain point for investors in private capital markets” with software that extracts, audits, and tracks “thousands of investment data points” from investment agreements, according to the statement. 

Lewis, formerly an attorney at Latham & Watkins and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, has been chief executive officer of Aumni since the beginning of 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile. He describes Aumni as software-as-a-services company that “tracks critical financial, commercial and legal terms across a private equity portfolio.” 

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In the company’s statement, Lewis said that with “SVB’s support, we’re even better positioned to expand our offering and achieve our goal of changing the landscape of the private capital markets ecosystem.” He did not immediately reply to a LinkedIn message seeking comment on Aumni.

“Aumni's platform empowers investors at venture firms, corporate venture funds, and family offices with the ability to unlock and structure the untapped data living inside their portfolios,” Mike Descheneaux, president of Silicon Valley Bank, said in the statement. “We know that our investor client base is eager to leverage data to enhance decision making and track performance.”