Episode summary
Why Most LPs Have No Idea What’s in Their Portfolio
How I Invest With David Weisburd
· · 20 min · Hosts: David Weisburd · Guests: Ryan Eisenman
Summary
Arch supports about 550 clients and says it has $405 billion in assets on the platform, positioning itself as an operating system for private markets rather than a simple reporting tool. Ryan Eisenman argued that LPs waste enormous time manually logging into portals, reading PDFs, and copying data into spreadsheets, and that this creates bad decision-making because investors cannot clearly see unfunded commitments, liquidity needs, or portfolio exposure.
He said the pain compounds as LPs scale from 10 to 25 to 50 fund commitments, forcing firms and advisers into operational chaos around capital calls, K-1s, distributions, and reconciliation. A major theme was that private markets still lack standardized data, with information fragmented across 800 portals and 50,000 unique investments, which makes valuations and reporting inconsistent. Eisenman said Arch uses AI to extract terms from LPAs and summarize statements into usable data.
He also argued that the market is shifting. Venture fundraising has fallen sharply from 2022 peaks, while new capital is coming from wealth channels, independent sponsors, co-invests, and secondaries. He expects more liquidity, better data infrastructure, and eventually more borrowable private asset products as markets become more transparent and standardized.
Key takeaways
- Ryan Eisenman said Arch serves about 550 clients and $405 billion in assets, with demand driven by the need to automate private-market paperwork and portfolio tracking.
- He argued that LPs become operationally overwhelmed as commitments grow, because they must manage capital calls, K-1s, distributions, and reconciliation across many funds.
- Eisenman said venture fundraising in 2025 was only 15% of 2022 levels, while wealth-channel capital is increasingly filling the gap.
- He said private-market data is fragmented across 800 portals and 50,000 unique investments, making standard valuation and reporting extremely difficult.
- Ryan Eisenman said Arch uses AI to pull buried terms from 100-page LPAs and summarize fund documents into decision-ready outputs.
- He expects more liquidity from secondaries and IPOs to help LPs redeploy capital, because 2024 and 2025 DPI was only 9% versus a historic 24% model.
Notable quotes
“Today we support about 550 clients. Our clients have 405 billion in assets on the platform”
“they can now have that process automated for them. The second thing is it's really hard to make good decisions if you don't understand your data”
“a lot of folks don't have good understanding of the liquidity needs in their portfolio and do they have $1 million or $5 million or $10 million of net commitments”
“we collect from 800 different portals and platforms. there's just a lot of work needed to go first get all the documents and structure the data then standardize it”
“Today we collect information from 50,000 unique investments and they all use a different format, a different portal, do their accounting slightly differently”
How the episode opens
So for context, give me a sense for how big Arch is today. — Today we support about 550 clients. Our clients have 405 billion in assets on the platform. Uh we're a solution for tracking, managing, and automating all the the paperwork around alternative investments. So the assets we serve are stakes in private equity, hedge funds, venture, uh credit funds, some crypto, anything that's not a stock or bond.
So you support 405 billion in assets. Tell me about what that looks like.
Without Arch and Pre-archch, a lot of LPs are logging manually into all these different data rooms. They're going into Interlinks, Carta, Juniper Square, um, platforms that are not necessarily built for LPS to understand their investments and they're getting PDFs that they then have to read and put into spreadsheets. We go get all that data and that information on the LP's beha behalf.
Our clients are global banks, RAAS, about 200 single family offices, institutional allocators. And they use us to get all the information from these different funds and their fund platforms, structure it, standardize it, and then give them dashboards, analytics, and insights on their portfolio. Uh, so we become kind of like the Schwablike operating system bringing to private markets what platforms like Schwab and Robin Hood brought to public markets.
How does that practically help LPs? Um, one, it saves them a lot of time. So instead of having to hire analysts who spend a lot of their day going into portals and platforms, uh, they can now have that process automated for them.
The second thing is it's really hard to make good decisions if you don't understand your data and understand the signal within your data. And so it could be things like has this manager performed or how much unfunded commitments do I have across these investments or these entities down to how much SpaceX do I have in my portfolio and how much drive do I have and am I a net buyer or seller at this price.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- lp portfolio transparency
- private markets data fragmentation
- private fund liquidity visibility
- venture fundraising slowdown
- ai for lp document extraction
Companies and tickers mentioned
- Arch
- AlphaSense
Watch the episode
Watch “Why Most LPs Have No Idea What’s in Their Portfolio” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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How I Invest With David Weisburd, this episode and its artwork belong to David Weisburd. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
