Juniper Square has, from a virtual standing start, become one of the fastest-growing providers of data and investor services to private-market participants.
Earlier in the summer it received a US$130 million series D capital injection that underscored its prospects and valued the company within unicorn territory. That’s unsurprising for a company whose platform has, since forming in 2014, grown to support 40,000 private equity, private credit, venture capital, infrastructure and real estate funds with about a trillion dollars in investor capital and across more than a million asset positions.
Created in San Francisco as an investor relations software provider, Juniper Square’s co-founder and chief executive Alex Robinson came up with the corporate blueprint with his colleagues after vainly trying to get from private markets the sort of data that is readily available in public markets.
“It was an eye-opening experience for Alex,” Kevin Rippon, Juniper Square head of marketing tells Data Management Insight.
“He and the other co-founders didn’t come into the private markets with a preconceived thesis of ‘this is the problem and here’s the solution’. Instead, they were trying to understand the fundamental question: why is it that despite the fact that you can do almost everything online today, the same wasn’t true in private markets? That curiosity and customer focus has driven everything we’ve built.”
Property Fund
Two-time start-up founder Robinson had created Juniper Square after trying to subscribe to a property fund. Instead of data on where best to invest, her received reams of documents in the post about company performance, prospectuses and financial reports.
With some friends who had been instrumental in establishing Nextdoor, a network for sharing useful information within neighbourhoods, Robinson began interviewing as many as 150 general partners and limited partners to get a grasp on why private markets had yet to fully embrace digitalisation.
“Our early product roadmap was built around a core challenge: how do we serve different real estate strategies, fund strategies and fund structures while normalising all that data?” explains Rippon from his office in New York. “The goal was to create output that would allow a GP to fully understand every position an LP has in their fund, along with comprehensive performance metrics across their entire portfolio.”
Flourishing Business
By 2018, the business had expanded beyond private property funds and was flourishing. The leadership team also decided to eschew going into partnership with a larger company to develop its digital products and instead would focus on expanding the company’s services in-house.
From this came the creation of Juniper Square’s fund administration unit, bringing digitalisation into the back as well as the front offices of private market GPs.
Billing itself now as a “fund operations partner”, Juniper Square believes its ability to provide a holistic view across the investment space gives it an edge in the nascent private data market, offering clients a software or services solution to any operational challenge.
“The fund administration side is compelling to GP firms because all of their data across their funds, investors and investments is immediately available to them,” says Rippon.
“They can verify it themselves, which creates trust and transparency. We recognised early on that we had a significant technology advantage—our common data model ensures reporting accuracy, we aren’t reconciling different spreadsheets on an ongoing basis. All calculations are happening within a single, centralised platform.”
Resource Efficiency
By taking in client’s “undifferentiated heavy lifting”, Rippon says Juniper Square liberates companies’ human resources so that they can focus solely on the differentiating investment and relationship-building activities.
While the platform has been built to service GPs, more than 650,000 LPs have accounts with the company. And with private and alternative investment now accounting for about a third of institutional capital allocations, Rippon says the traditionally public players have become an important part of Juniper Square’s business.
“One of our three value pillars is enhancing the investor experience,” he says. “There’s a high probability that if you’re an institutional investor, you have at least one fund on Juniper Square.
“Institutions often prioritise operational soundness; GPs thus rely on Juniper Square’s connected software and fund administration services to streamline operations for the benefit of their investors.”
Expansion Plans
As a young company born in the digital age, it’s unsurprising that Juniper Square has created its own artificial intelligence proposition. JunieAI is a generative AI tool that enables GPs to query their own data. Trained also on private markets-focussed data and with access to third-party data sources, JunieAI can scan and parse information from unstructured sources such as PDFs and act as a co-pilot and assistant within productivity tools.
“Juniper Square is all-in on AI, and in June we launched JunieAI, our enterprise-grade AI platform built specifically for the private markets,” says Rippon. “One exciting capability of many is ‘chat with your Insights’. This gives GPs an easy interface to ask any question about their investors, assets, funds, and so on, and not only get accurate answers, but also visualisations that users can drill into further, save, and share.”
Expansion is in Juniper Square’s short- and medium-term plans. This year it bought Forstone Luxembourg, a funds servicing provider, to give it a European base in the tiny principality that sits at the heart of the region’s private markets industry.
Juniper Square is also committing $200m in R&D over the next five years as it seeks to “continuously deliver new automations and data capabilities within our software and fund administration services”, says Rippon.
“We envision what you might call the democratisation of private markets,” he adds. “We believe this transformation is underway, and we want to be a catalyst that accelerates that trajectory and makes private markets more accessible for everyone.”
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