Reference: Found hereS itting beneath the $15 trillion that global investors have sunk into private capital, a burgeoning pool of investments that covers everything from private equity and private credit to venture capital and real estate funds , is a mind-numbing accounting problem. Investment firms make countless bespoke deals with their deep-pocketed clients, creating the need for highly complex, custom calculations to figure out the investment firms' management fees and who will reap what share of the profits.
"It doesn't matter if you manage $50 million or $250 billion across venture capital, real estate or private equity. All of this is managed in Excel," says Ross Mechanic, the 30-year-old cofounder and CEO of fintech company Maybern. His three-year-old, 32-person New York startup uses software to automate the gnarly calculations, aiming to save accounting teams time, improve their accuracy and help them produce reports faster. Mechanic also plans to expand beyond accounting to help private equity firms make strategic decisions on when they should sell an asset.
In May 2024, Maybern raised $14 million in funding led by Primary Ventures at an $80 million valuation. It has raised $26 million since its 2021 start.
There's a growing need for software serving this space. The private capital market has nearly doubled in size over the past five years, but the technical infrastructure supporting it hasn't kept up. "Software tools exist for them, but they're monumentally behind," says Emily Man, a partner at Primary Ventures who led the firm's recent Maybern investment. And a severe shortage of accountants has made the problem much worse.
"We had a five-person team checking those numbers, and we were finding errors every quarter. It was insane to me, especially as an engineer, that we had a billion and a half under management and it was all happening in Excel." Today, Mechanic estimates that 95% of these calculations are still done in Excel, even at the largest private equity funds.
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