Behind the Scenes: How a $250B asset manager and leading advisors are rethinking alts infrastructure

Inside the Canoe x PrimePlus® client roundtable at Goldman Sachs

The alternatives industry is at an inflection point. New capital is flooding into private markets, sponsors are rolling out innovative fund structures, and retail investors are gaining unprecedented access—yet the operational infrastructure supporting this growth remains stubbornly fragmented. LPs are managing data across disconnected point solutions, cobbling together exposure reports from quarterly documents, and answering urgent investment committee questions days (or weeks) after they’re asked.

In October 2025, Canoe brought together clients and industry leaders at Goldman Sachs in New York City to discuss a recent market entry that presents a different path forward: a fully integrated solution that automates the investor journey from document to insight, with zero admin.  The approach pairs Canoe’s document intelligence with PrimePlus®, Prime Buchholz’s operational and analytics platform that validates, supports, and surfaces Canoe data in a transparent, easy-to-use experience. What emerged from the discussion was a clear signal that the market is ready to move beyond siloed systems and toward the kind of seamless data infrastructure that will define the next era of alts investing.

The Linear Value Chain Problem

Today’s alternatives ecosystem operates as a series of vertical silos. GPs work with one set of platforms for data management and investor communications. LPs work with an entirely different set for document processing, performance tracking, and portfolio analytics. One system’s outputs become another system’s inputs, with manual reconciliation filling the gaps in between.

This fragmentation creates a fundamentally disconnected GP-LP relationship, making it nearly impossible to optimize for transparency, speed, and depth of information. Compare this to public markets, which operate on integrated platforms with real-time data flows and digital-first infrastructure. The contrast is stark—and unsustainable.

The consensus from industry leaders is clear: over time, the alts space will converge toward something that resembles public markets infrastructure. Not just in terms of investor profile, but in the operational architecture needed to support it. A centralized digital platform that streamlines information flow between GPs and LPs isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s inevitable. The only question is who builds it first.

What LPs Are Struggling With Today

The operational burden facing alts investors today isn’t abstract. It’s daily fire drills, manual reconciliation, and investment teams waiting on data that should be at their fingertips.

Consider one attendee, a $250B multi-family office serving ultra-high-net-worth clients across hundreds of fund managers. “We needed data access as quickly as possible,” their managing director shared with the group. The firm had built sophisticated tools for advisors and operations teams, but lacked a systematic way to solve for exposure analysis across their portfolio spanning all asset classes. The result was that investment professionals couldn’t quickly answer fundamental questions about what they actually owned at the portfolio company level.

Many sophisticated LPs have pursued a “best-of-breed” technology strategy, assembling specialized point solutions for each workflow. The logic seems sound: pick the best accounting system, the best document management platform, the best analytics tool, and connect them.

The reality proves more challenging. “We were the people who said we need best-of-breed for everything,” one attendee admitted, “Everyone just claims, ‘You can build an API’—I actually have no idea how to build an API. It’s a lot of work not only to set up, but then to maintain.”

The problem is that point solutions don’t naturally talk to each other. Data flows break. Reconciliation burden falls on internal teams. Investment professionals waste time hunting for information across systems rather than analyzing what the data reveals.

The ad hoc analysis trap compounds these challenges. Our roundtable attendees reported that investment committees are asking increasingly sophisticated questions, such as: “What’s our AI exposure in China versus North America?” “Which sectors are driving our IT concentration?” “How does our growth equity performance compare to buyout strategies?”

“People are making decisions much quicker, much more reactively,” one attendee shared, “Therefore it’s incumbent on us to be able to gain access to that data quickly.” The expectation isn’t just that firms can answer these questions—it’s that they can answer them immediately, with confidence, backed by validated data.

A Partnership Born from Market Friction

The Canoe x PrimePlus® partnership started when one of the most sophisticated private markets advisory firms in the world, Prime Buchholz, was facing a similar operational burden—and they became a client of Canoe.

The results were immediate. The document collection and data extraction that had consumed significant analyst time became automated. Prime Buchholz reported that each analyst was able to handle multiple times more funds than before. At the same time, Prime Buchholz was investing in PrimePlus®, its operational and analytics platform for client-facing portfolio intelligence—enabling portfolio monitoring, exposure analysis, and performance reporting—while Canoe powered the underlying data on the back end with precision. The integration between the two created what Dan Ricci, Head of Information Systems at Prime Buchholz, called “a hyper-efficient piece of the value chain” that connected document automation directly to investment decision-making.

The partnership expansion previewed at this advisory roundtable addresses market demand directly. As of December 2025, the Canoe x PrimePlus® solution is now available to the broader market as a fully integrated offering. It’s the same hyper-efficient workflow, the same unified platform, the same zero-admin promise—opened up to LPs who want to eliminate the friction of disconnected systems.

How the Integration Works

During the exclusive platform preview in New York City, a contingent of shared clients and members of both Canoe and Prime Buchholz previewed three interconnected layers of this new offering, each solving a distinct problem in the traditional linear value chain:

Layer One: Document & Data Foundation (Canoe)
Canoe’s AI-powered platform processes over 1 million documents monthly across 44,000+ funds, extracting data from capital call notices, distribution notices, quarterly reports, and financial statements. The system applies 100+ validation checks at the point of extraction. Every data point remains traceable back to its source document—the complete audit trail compliance teams require, and investment teams trust.

Layer Two: Data Stewardship (Prime Buchholz)
Experts at Prime Buchholz take Canoe’s extracted data and apply the validation and enrichment logic refined over years of managing their own advisory portfolios. The platform normalizes transaction signage across managers, reconciles net activity against gross calls and distributions, validates unfunded commitments, and adjusts valuation timing to match client reporting conventions.

Dan Ricci explained, “Our objective is to manage the Canoe tenants comprehensively, so that by the time data gets into PrimePlus, it’s ready and available in the analytics experience.”

This behind-the-scenes work is what enables the “zero admin” promise. Investment teams never see the exception handling, the reconciliation loops, or the enrichment research. They just see clean, validated, usable data—the same standard Prime Buchholz holds for their own advisory clients.

Layer Three: Rapid Insight (PrimePlus®)

The Prime Buchholz team walked attendees through a few of the platform highlights from PrimePlus®:

• Cash flow monitoring that updates daily—with transaction-level detail and direct access to source documents. Status dashboards showed which funds had released valuations as of which dates, current unfunded commitments by strategy, and a capital call pipeline that one participant noted would “eliminate our weekly reconciliation meetings.”
• Performance analytics that auto-calculate IRRs, multiples, and public market equivalent metrics across 840+ benchmarks. Toggle from S&P 500 to Russell 2000 to a global index—PME numbers recalculate instantly. The platform rolls up metrics from individual investments through manager-level to strategy-level to total portfolio views, enabling comparisons that previously required days of analyst work.
• Exposure analysis that reveals the complete look-through to underlying portfolio companies. In the demo environment with 350 holdings, users could filter by sector, geography, vintage, or manager with one click. The platform flagged cross-exposures—when the same portfolio company appeared across multiple GPs—that would be invisible in standard quarterly reporting.

When Ricci showed how teams could save custom views (Asia-only investments, buyout-only exposure, specific entity structures), one multi-family office leader who is a client of both Canoe and PrimePlus® chimed in how this solved a persistent challenge for scaling their efforts: “Our Asia team doesn’t want to see everything. Each team member just wants to see their slice, automatically, when they log in.”

A notable moment came when someone asked about data completeness. Rather than hide gaps, the platform surfaced coverage metrics showing exactly where GP reporting was strong and where it wasn’t. “That transparency builds trust,” one participant observed. “I appreciate knowing what I’m looking at and what I’m not.”

The demo made clear what written descriptions can’t fully capture: the difference between getting data and actually using it. Investment teams in the room weren’t asking “Can it do X?”—they were already thinking about how it would change their Monday morning investment committee prep.

From Quarterly Fire Drills to Always-On Intelligence

This shift from fragmented tools to integrated infrastructure unlocks capabilities that were previously impossible or impractically slow.

• Speed: Questions that took two weeks of analyst time now get answered in seconds. Investment teams run their own exposure analysis instead of waiting for ops to compile reports.

• Depth: One single-family office shared that it was only with these tools that they realized their largest holding was spread across multiple GPs—a concentration risk that was completely invisible in quarterly reports. 

• Scale: A single analyst could handle 5x the funds as before. One advisory firm reported managing 700+ client instances without proportional increases in support staff.

• The impossible becomes routine: “What’s my AI exposure in China versus North America?” is now a few clicks with instant drill-down to the portfolio companies and funds driving that exposure. 

The Competitive Advantage of Connecting the Value Chain

The integrated approach offers a fundamentally different value proposition, partially because everything traces back to source documents. It’s a single source of truth, not 20 systems struggling to stay synchronized.

“To have one infrastructure where I can toggle back and forth… if I know my data source is right, it only makes me feel more confident,” a shared client of Canoe and PrimePlus® explained. “I don’t have to cross-check.”

This confidence compounds. Role-based optimization means investment teams live in analytics dashboards while operations teams stay in performance reporting systems, yet data flows seamlessly between them. 

What’s Next

Our October client advisory roundtable made one thing clear: the market isn’t merely open to an integrated alts data infrastructure; it’s demanding it. LPs are actively looking for a complete rethinking of how data flows from GP to LP, how insights surface from raw information, and how quickly decisions can be made with confidence.

The Canoe x PrimePlus® offering delivers on that vision with a bold step forward. Tangibly, it means LPs can finally ensure documents, data, exposures, and analytics work in concert—without sacrifice—thus eliminating administrative burden, surfacing risks that quarterly reports miss, and giving investment teams the real-time access they’ve been asking for.

Firms that embrace integrated infrastructure today position themselves for the alts market of tomorrow—one where speed, transparency, and depth of insight separate leaders from laggards.

Ready to see what integrated infrastructure could look like for you?

Explore the Canoe x PrimePlus® offering and discover how to automate the journey from document to insight—with zero admin on your end. 

Learn More About Canoe x PrimePlus®

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About Canoe Intelligence
Canoe Intelligence (“Canoe”) is the platform for smarter alts management. We redefine alternative investment intelligence with AI-driven software that directly addresses the core challenges of private markets. Our technology empowers institutions, LPs, and wealth managers to future-proof their alts infrastructure, modernizing systems and providing a scalable foundation for long-term growth and compliance. By automating manual data processing with AI-native precision, Canoe helps clients reduce operational costs and risks, significantly lowering overhead and mitigating errors. Ultimately, our timely, accurate, and comprehensive data enables investment teams to drive superior investment outcomes through deeper insights and more profitable allocation strategies. With Canoe, it’s all about making Alts, smarter. Learn more at www.canoeintelligence.com.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Betsy Miller Daitch
Canoe Intelligence
+1 443-690-6200
bdaitch@canoeintelligence.com