Tech firm Canoe looks to streamline customized reporting

The tech provider completed its Series A round of financing with strategic partners that include Hamilton Lane and Nasdaq Ventures, as the firm looks to scale.

Canoe Intelligence, a fintech provider that aims to automate and improve alternative investment operations for institutional investors, allocators and asset servicing firms, has completed a round of Series A funding to scale the business. In addition to new capital, the firm credits Hamilton Lane and Nasdaq Ventures, among others, as strategic partners in its move to establish itself as an industry-wide leader.

“We’re building the first public data infrastructure for private markets by consolidating and allowing our clients to introduce millions and millions of PDF documents, and turn those PDF documents into data, which then can be transformed into knowledge for the benefit of running their business,” Seth Brotman, chief executive of Canoe, told Private Funds CFO.

Seth Brotman

Canoe’s platform is the private markets equivalent to one provided by Plaid, which was bought in January for $5.3 billion by Visa and focuses on public markets. Brotman said that Canoe originated from its partners’ long-time experience in multi-family office – a real estate sector with infamously complex reporting requirements based on a sea of collected information.

LPs and beyond…

The platform, which was founded in 2013 within Portage Partners and spun out in 2017, eliminates the need to extract individual data from PDFs, making it easier to create customized data sets and reports from fund reporting documents. For now, the aim is to make LPs’ lives easier (and by association, the GPs they request customized reports from).

“What I would say is there is a significant amount of data that is not being utilized by the LP community to help drive allocation portfolio management investment decision making,” Brotman said, since collecting, inputting and analyzing the data is time and resource intensive. Canoe’s platform uses machine learning and natural language processing, among other processes, to collect, categorize, validate and deliver report information to “whatever downstream system or port generator that our clients are using,” he added.

That will not only help LPs produce the bespoke reports they ask their GPs to have delivered to them, but also to analyze data historically and produce new risk profiles, as well as help predict the timing of, say, capital calls, for a particular fund.

“So if you have technology that unlocks the ability to not only grab significantly more robust pieces of information that are being provided to you from the GP, but you can do it historically, and you can do it on a go-forward basis in [less than] seconds – that provides context that allows for a lot better decision making,” Brotman said.

Canoe hopes to dive deeper into realms of collecting and automating portfolio company data, as well as to create enhanced efficiencies for GPs around the operating processes for new subscriptions and building new funds.

Other funding participants who are also strategic partners include Nasdaq Ventures, Portage Partners and Promus Capital. Its market relationships include StepStone Group, Lexington Partners, Canterbury Consulting and Truvvo Partners.