The competitive field to build out the tech infrastructure to ease the use of alternative investments in the wealth channel just got a little more crowded as New York-based fintech Aqua announced a $18.8 million Series A to back what it’s calling a turnkey alternative investments platform.
The AI-native platform seeks to be a single solution that brings fund creation, operational workflows, investment lifecycle management, marketplace access, document intelligence and investor servicing into a single environment. In addition to managing off-the-shelf private market funds, advisors using Aqua can build special purpose vehicles, registered funds, fund of funds and feeder funds.
The $15 million Series A, led by Arthur Ventures with participation from Alumni Ventures, follows a 2021 $3.8 million seed round backed by Google’s AI Fund, Y Combinator. It plans to use the funding to accelerate business and platform development, expand its engineering and partnership teams, and deepen integrations across custodians and fund sponsors. (The firm started as a team of six, but now has two dozen employees and it plans to continue to staff up as it onboards more advisors and fund managers.)
To be sure, Aqua is far from alone in attempting to streamline the alternative investments process. The space continues to be led by well-known players iCapital and CAIS, which service thousands of wealth firms through their marketplaces, and each has continued to add tech to support the lifecycle of alternative investments. Firms including SUBSCRIBE, Canoe, Gridline, Allocate, Alto, Arch, Opto, GLAS Funds, Altigo/SEI and Apex Alts also compete in the area, focusing on streamlining all aspects of the investment process. In addition, traditional TAMPs like InvestCloud, Envestnet, Orion, Addepar and Black Diamond have made enhancements to support private markets.
In an interview, Rohan Marwaha, co-founder and CEO of Aqua, said the goal is to customize the platform, including the use of AI agents, around how firms operate.
“We are implanting a platform into white-label environments instead of forcing them to build around an existing platform,” Marwaha said. “The platform is molded around that. … It is configurable to their use case, minimizing the hoops they need to jump through.”
It uses AI agents to take on some of the monotonous tasks in the alternative investment process and is evaluating where it can add more value to further streamline the process.
Aqua currently works with 8,000 advisory professionals and has clients on both the wealth management and asset management sides. On the advisory side, DAI Securities, Arkadios Capital, Concorde Investment Services and Independent Financial Group are clients. On the asset manager side, users include LaSalle Investment Management, Cantor Fitzgerald, The Inland Real Estate Group of Companies and others.
Prior to launching Aqua, Marwaha built solutions across technology and alternative investments for alternative asset managers, while David Coyle, head of growth, has driven tech adoption at advisory firms for over 25 years. Head of Growth Partnerships Joe Ujobai spent more than 35 years in financial services and technology, with leadership roles in private banking and international expansion.
