Two big names in the private markets technology space just made two big moves, all in the same week.
First, Juniper Square announced the acquisition of Tenor Digital, an AI-native platform for private credit automation. Two days later, Carta announced their own private credit related acquisition, of Sirvatus, a tech-enabled loan administration platform.
Why the interest in this space? Private credit is on track to hit $3 trillion by 2028, according to Moody’s. And last year, more than 2x the capital was raised in private credit compared to venture capital.
We sat down with Alex Robinson, the CEO of Juniper Square, to talk about the acquisition of Tenor Digital, how AI is transforming fund operations right now, and why Juniper Square is betting $250 million on R&D over the next five years.
Why Private Credit Matters More Than You Think
Here’s a number that should make you sit up: In 2024, private credit raised more than double the capital of venture capital.
“Private credit is the fastest growing segment of the private markets,” Alex explained. “It’s just exploded post Dodd-Frank over the last decade or so.”
The numbers back this up. Moody’s estimates the segment will reach $3 trillion by 2028. And unlike venture capital, private credit provides current income and yield. That makes it particularly attractive for fund managers trying to tap into the retail and high net worth segments.
But here’s the problem: The software systems built for traditional equity funds don’t work for private credit.
“You’re making loans and you’re collecting interest and you’re sending out notices and you’ve got all this complex accounting around the loans… The traditional software systems that have been developed to support private markets funds, generally equity funds, don’t really provide a solution for private credit.”
That’s where Tenor Digital comes in. Founded by members of the ex-Investran team (Investran is the default general ledger for 90% of top private equity managers), Tenor was built specifically for the unique needs of private credit—and it’s AI-native from day one.
And you thought LPAs were complicated…
Every loan a private credit fund makes means there’s a credit agreement attached. These agreements run 300 to 500 pages. (“Worse than an LPA,” I joked. “Yeah, totally,” Alex confirmed.)
Traditionally, fund managers have teams of hundreds of people whose entire job is processing these agreements. They come in, open that day’s credit agreement, and spend the entire day extracting variables—interest rates, covenants, and dozens of other data points—then manually entering everything into their systems.
“That kind of use case is just perfect for LLMs,” Alex said. “LLMs are only going to get it 80% right. But going from zero to 80% and having the software for a human reviewer to check—it takes this process that used to be a day per agreement down to minutes.”
This is the real pattern of AI productivity: massive time compression paired with necessary human oversight. Not replacing humans, but fundamentally changing the economics of knowledge work.
The Weekend That Changed Everything
I’m always curious how CEOs are using AI in their day-to-day work. Alex told us he uses AI across “literally every facet” of his job that’s not face-to-face meetings.
But Alex took this one step further than most. He vibe coded an app over a weekend that would help him deliver better and faster feedback to his team. It takes a few lines of input from Alex and unpacks it into something comprehensive and contextualized that will be useful to the person receiving it. “It costs me the same amount of effort (as how I was giving feedback prior to building the app), but it’s so much more effective,” Alex said.
This level of effectiveness comes from the fact that the LLM powering the app knows:
- everyone he works with
- the company
- and Alex himself
Here’s what else building that app did. It opened his eyes to going from idea to working prototype almost instantly.
“That was a really critical moment for me of opening my eyes to the potential productivity unlock in building software… That gave me the confidence to come back to the organization and say, we are going to transform around this technology. There’s no turning back.”
That experience also shaped his thinking around where he shouldn’t expect to see benefits from the use of AI. “You can’t demand a 10x speedup on code review if where the technology is giving the boost is in prototyping,” Alex explained. Understanding what benefits to measure is also critical, and he had some strong opinions on that topic as well:
“There’s a lot of companies like, ‘Oh, X percent of our code is being written by AI now.’ To me, that’s sort of a pretty random vanity, kind of almost foolish metric.”
The Build vs. Buy Framework
Juniper Square has made three major moves recently: a Luxembourg fund administrator earlier this year, Tenor Digital for private credit last week, and brought in NASDAQ Ventures as a strategic investor. So how does Alex think about M&A? It always starts with the customer.
“We’re very customer-centric as a company. That’s who we pay attention to,” Alex said. “We try to understand our customer needs very deeply. And then once we understand what a customer needs from us, then it’s a question of build versus buy.”
For the Luxembourg acquisition, the calculus was clear: Getting set up as a fund administrator with licensure and regulatory approvals from scratch is a multi-year, very expensive process. Plus you have to build expert staff from the ground up. Finding Forstone Luxembourg (now Juniper Square Luxembourg)—a team with the licensure, customer credibility, and expert staff already in place—made acquisition the obvious path to speed time to market.
Same concept, different application with Tenor Digital.
“We needed a technology solution,” Alex explained. “We had been on the hunt to either build this ourselves or try to find a compelling technology solution in the market.”
But the growth strategy isn’t just about M&A. Alex said that Juniper Square is committing $250 million in R&D over the next five years, focused specifically on fund operations automation.
The Venture5 Take
When you look at what it takes to IPO in tech, it’s usually companies that have multiple major products, all of which have multi-billion dollar TAMs. That’s why I have a hard time seeing any private markets tech company reaching exit velocity without having a (big) story and significant traction in multiple asset classes, especially when one of those asset classes is as big as private credit. So it’s not surprising that Juniper Square and Carta are both making moves there at similar times.
Does this mean we’ll see other venture backed companies who play in the fund admin space move into private credit as well? Given the size of the prize, I wouldn’t be surprised. We’ll keep you posted!
