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Capital Markets Infrastructure

October 27, 2025

Over the last decade, we’ve seen a powerful wave of innovation aimed at access in the capital markets - democratizing participation through digital, fee-free trading, fractional ownership, and exposure to alternatives. Platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase made it easier than ever for individuals to buy into the financial system.

But while the front end has modernized, the back end has not. The plumbing beneath our financial markets aka the systems that move, clear, reconcile, and report trillions of dollars each day, remains largely stitched together by manual workflows, legacy mainframes, and siloed custodians.

As both institutional and retail capital continue to pour into new and more complex asset classes from private credit to prediction markets to real world power centers, the operational burden on this outdated infrastructure will only grow. The next generation of innovation will come from rebuilding the pipes that make these markets function: real-time, automated, and interoperable across asset types.

We’re particularly excited about companies tackling pain points across the back and middle office layers of the stack:

  • Post-Trade and Clearing Infrastructure
    • Clearing, settlement, and reconciliation remain astonishingly manual across most asset classes (equities, fixed income, FX, and emerging digital assets). As markets push toward T+0 same-day or even instantaneous settlement, these manual processes become a bottleneck.
    • We’re looking for software-first approaches to automate post-trade operations: reconciliation APIs, universal ledgers, and clearing engines that can handle multi-asset workflows across public and private markets and provide easy to use UI’s + workflows for businesses that need these products. 
  • Transfer Agents and Issuer Infrastructure
    • Transfer agents act as the system of record for publicly traded companies — yet the industry is a near-duopoly with little incentive to modernize. 
    • We believe this is an under-explored wedge into a broader suite of issuer-side infrastructure for public companies: cap tables, dividends, proxy voting, and shareholder communications all need to move from PDFs and CSVs to real-time ledgers.
  • Securities Lending and Collateral Markets
    • The securities lending market represents roughly $34T of lendable assets, yet remains opaque, fragmented, and intermediated by a small handful of custodians. 
    • As institutional investors seek yield optimization, there’s room for a modern, transparent lending exchange as well as infrastructure opportunities - think automated collateral management, real-time risk monitoring, and clearing services that mirror the efficiency of electronic trading venues.
  • Private Markets Infrastructure
    • Private markets now exceed $15T in AUM, compounding ~15% annually, yet most back offices still run on Excel.
    • From fund admin to portfolio reporting to LP communication, the operating stack is decades behind. 
    • We’re eager to meet founders building the next generation of systems of record for GPs and LPs, enabling real-time NAV, dynamic waterfalls, and continuous capital account updates. 
  • Bloomberg terminal for new asset classes
    • The definition of “asset” is expanding - prediction markets, new energy grids, stablecoin treasuries, and even tokenized real-world commodities are emerging as investable categories.
    • As these new assets come online, real-time pricing and risk management become critical. There’s an opening for data, analytics, and pricing infrastructure that can model volatility, correlations, and liquidity across both physical and digital markets. 
    • We’re particularly interested in fast growing emerging new categories where accurate, real time data is scarce and there’s an opportunity to use LLMs to build that data asset quickly.

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