The end of the PDF era: How Canoe Intelligence is automating the alts world

Investing in private markets has often involved dealing with endless PDFs, manual data entry, and slow reporting. Public markets have the advantage of a digital, transparent experience, but the alternatives space has stayed mostly analog until now.

In this episode of the AYU Family Office Podcast, Mike Muniz, Co-founder of Canoe Intelligence, traces the origin story of a platform that is fundamentally changing how family offices and institutional allocators scale. From Mike’s early days at Cambridge Associates to spinning Canoe out of a single-family office, we dive into:

• The moment of insight that inspired a machine-learning solution for document processing.
• How the global pandemic unexpectedly sped up digital transformation in back-office operations.
• The future of GP-to-LP reporting and the shift toward public-market transparency standards.

 

Watch the episode below or listen wherever you get your podcasts

 

 

Transcript

 

[00:00:00] Gus: Mike, how are you? Welcome to the podcast.

[00:00:02] Mike: Gus, great to see you! Thanks for having me.

[00:00:05] Gus: Good to have you here. We’ve been working with you guys for a good year now, so it’s good to have you on screen and on mic for the first time. We’ve been working with your team in the US, the UK, and Switzerland as well. Thank you for joining us today.

[00:00:25] Gus: Let’s kick off maybe with the founder story and where you are today and where that’s come from. Tell us about Canoe from the top down.

[00:00:35] Mike: Yeah, Gus, it’s been a fantastic partnership with your team over the years. We appreciate all the work we’ve done and the opportunity to be here and tell the Canoe story.

For your audience, what we’ve done at Canoe is build a platform driven by machine learning and AI that automates all of the operational work associated with investing in alternative and private markets funds.

I always use the analogy: when I invest in public markets, I can log into my Fidelity or Vanguard account and, on a daily basis, obtain a snapshot view of how my portfolio is performing, how it’s positioned, which funds are up, which are down. In the private markets, that doesn’t exist because the reporting structure is infrequent, lacks transparency, and is driven by PDF reporting.

So what we’ve done at Canoe is said, “Alright, let’s create an experience that more closely mirrors their public markets reporting experience and remove as much of the manual burden as possible.”

If you’re a single-family office investing in the private markets, after you make a commitment to a fund, you’re flooded with an information overload via PDF: partner capital account statements on a quarterly basis, capital call notices, financial statements, tax documents, investor letters. Every fund reports in a different structure, different format, at different frequencies. You have to log into portals, remember passwords, manage two-factor authentication.

When you get the documents, you have to make sense of what they are, which entity they’re related to, what’s the fund, do I have to use this document, is there actionable data? You have to pull the data from the documents, digitize that information, punch it manually on your keyboard into an Excel file, normalize the reporting across all the funds, and feed that into a reporting tool that, at the end, allows you to obtain that experience you can get via the Fidelity portal in your public investing portfolio.

That is a massive problem. It’s an impediment to scale. There’s a challenge with respect to latency and data quality anytime you have fingers on keys. Our view was: let’s build a platform that makes it easy to invest in alternatives for anyone, remove the manual process associated with that reporting, and allow investors to focus on monitoring their investments and making the right new investments.

[00:03:33] Gus: How did you get there? How did you see this problem, and what’s the founder origin story? That’s always a fascinating place to go. Was it you that bumped your head against this problem? What’s the basis?

[00:03:51] Mike: I’ll go back—rewind maybe 15 years. I started my career at Cambridge Associates, a massive investment consulting firm in Boston. I managed about eight clients and was tasked with helping them construct their portfolios, manage asset allocation, and find new managers (hedge funds, private equity funds, VC funds). I was also tasked with reporting on the performance of those after we recommended the investment.

I saw firsthand the challenges with respect to alternatives investment reporting. We had a team at Cambridge Associates of around 250 people in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Around the clock, their job was: gather documents from managers, process data, create reports, and send those reports to someone like me. I would review those reports, and inevitably, we would find issues and errors. We would send those reports back, they would re-run the process, and I would do the same thing.

So I saw the issues with respect to data quality, operational scale, latency, and cost. That stuck with me. After a few years, I moved into the startup world. I was an early hire at a firm called Novus Partners. We worked with GPs and LPs on better understanding alpha generation and predicting future performance. Big data problem, big data solution. We employed a team overseas in India to process documents. While that was relatively efficient compared to what I saw at Cambridge using an onshore team, the same challenges existed. As a startup, that was a real impediment to growth for us.

Those two early experiences stuck with me. I knew there was a problem in this space. Anyone investing in alternative or private markets funds is dealing with this challenge. It’s very analog, and there’s only more and more capital being infused into this space.

I moved over and ran a business that a firm called Dealogic acquired from 2014 to 2017. At that point, I was brought into a single-family office in New York City called Portage Partners. Portage had seen this same problem. As a single-family office, they decided to bring on a team of developers to act as their back office instead of building out a back-office team or offshoring the work.

A former colleague from Novus, Seth Brotman, and I took a look at this technology Portage had built. As soon as we saw it, our jaws just about hit the floor because this was a solution—a technology—that was solving a problem I had seen at Cambridge and Novus, and Seth had seen during his time investing at fund-of-funds and single-family offices.

We went through the process of spinning out the technology from the family office, raising a round of independent seed financing, and going to market. We operated in stealth mode for about a year validating that the technology was scalable—and it was. In late 2018, we came out of stealth mode and commercialized the business, and we’ve been off and running ever since.

[00:08:05] Gus: How did that get accelerated by rolling straight into COVID? Obviously, the narrative there is you launch, you’re ready to go, and bang—the world closes down. We actually had a not dissimilar thing—presented with the challenges of COVID, it actually presented a whole bunch of opportunities. How did that change the early story?

[00:08:26] Mike: It’s such a good question. Obviously, the world shuts down, and for the first few weeks to a month, our heads are spinning. We go remote, no one’s in the office, and we’re trying to figure out what to do and if our business is going to be viable.

At that point, we were fortunate enough to have raised a Series A round led by Hamilton Lane and Nasdaq. So we were well-positioned from a capital base perspective and had started to amass a nice base of clients.

After that first month, COVID was oddly a massive tailwind for Canoe for a few reasons. One, some of our largest prospects at the time had offshore teams in India. Those teams, because of what was happening in India, were lost for a period of five to seven days; their reporting process shut down.

That was a catalyst for them to say, “Look, we can have offshore resources and direct them to certain aspects of an overall workflow, but we need a technology solution that provides redundancy and scale, doesn’t get sick, doesn’t have to work from home, doesn’t have to set up all the VPNs in their home office, and is working around the clock to solve this problem,” which ultimately is the basis for how they ran their books, their accounting, and their analytics process.

That created a big push and catalyzed a lot of firms to finally make the decision that technology is the path forward. Up to that point, we were the only technology in the world solving this problem; it had only been people onshore and offshore. There was naturally some skepticism: could technology account for all the nuance and complexity with private markets? It turns out it can. Firms needed a catalyst to make the jump. So we benefited in that way. Obviously, it was a tough time in the world, but that really set us on the trajectory we’ve been on since.

[00:11:07] Gus: You mentioned the early prospects and users. Who were they then, and has that evolved since? And is there a point at AUM level—whether you’re a single-family office, multi-family office, asset manager, wealth manager—where this becomes useful, and has that changed over the last five or six years?

[00:11:39] Mike: Great question. I’ll give the flavor of who we work with today and then go backwards. Our client base is really anyone investing in the private markets or the alternatives space generally. We serve clients around the world; we’re approaching 500 clients. We work with single-family offices, multi-family offices, wealth managers, capital allocators (endowments, foundations, pensions, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies), fund-of-funds, secondary funds, big administrators who offer this service to their clients, and asset managers. It’s a broad, pervasive problem and market.

When we first launched, we had been incubated within a single-family office. We knew we had product-market fit; the product had been built alongside the CIO of the family office, so it was finely tuned for the process, nuance, and complexity associated with private markets. We built a nice base of early clients in the family office world.

We started to see that firms dealing with this on larger scales had a clearer ROI out of the box because they were spending millions of dollars on human teams that were largely inefficient and had challenges with quality. So we moved into the institutional and wealth management space—firms dealing with thousands or tens of thousands of investments across their client base.

One of the great things about Canoe is that the problem is effectively the same whether you invest in one private fund or a million private funds. At smaller scales, you can manage this process on your own. We tend to see that once you hit that 100-fund or 100-commitment/subscription threshold, the challenges really start to be painful and a technology solution that can automate that process becomes really beneficial.

[00:15:11] Gus: If we’re looking at funds—alternatives funds—can we bring in direct deals and private-market stuff specifically for family offices? Our members are very active in private markets, but also co-investment and direct deal private deal flow is huge. How does Canoe deal with that at the same time?

[00:15:39] Mike: It depends! A lot of it depends on the reporting structure of the deal. Our focus is on automating the PDF-based workflow. Whether a fund reports their quarterly statement, ad-hoc cash flow, or a direct deal reports an annual report with information about the value of the deal—if a position is distributing PDF communication to an investor, we can automate that process. We gather the PDF, process and digitize it, and get the data where it needs to go (Excel, Snowflake, Addepar, etc.). If a direct deal is not reporting in that way—maybe through a call or some other format—there’s a separate process. But if you get an email every six months that can be sent into Canoe, it can be processed. Anything sending you PDF-based communication is in scope for what we can help automate.

[00:17:35] Gus: Is there potential to go a bit further down the pipe with the GP or deal owner and wipe out the PDF, giving them a more structured reporting offering to condense that process?

[00:17:49] Mike: It’s like you were in our strategy workshops this year, Gus! We’re likely to go out for another round of fundraising next year as we continue to really want to fuel our growth. This is certainly an area of interest for us. You might say the PDF goes away and our business is cannibalized; I think if we can be on the bleeding edge and drive that change, our business is significantly more valuable and our clients are significantly happier.

Today, the process is totally analog compared to public markets. Public is digitized, interconnected, and seamless. Private markets and fund investing are disconnected, PDF-based, and lack transparency. We think by bringing in the GP to this process and exploring how to streamline the flow of information in a more digital fashion—perhaps through a central platform like Canoe—the industry takes a leap forward. It almost has to because capital is flowing into the space; the tailwinds here are in the retail and wealth space. To serve those clients, you have to move toward public markets standards because that’s what they’re used to and expect. Canoe would love to be the driving force in creating that connectivity.

[00:20:02] Gus: How is that landscape right now? Is it a crowded marketplace? Many people doing what you’re doing? Are you first to market here?

[00:20:11] Mike: When we launched, we were the first technology, so we sort of defined this category from a tech perspective. For a long time, we were the only technology in town, and that served us well. Over the last few years, there have been new entrants, which we expected because this is a massive market and a needed solution.

It’s certainly become a bit more competitive. We see firms entering the space tend to focus on one segment of the market (e.g., regional focus on just Europe/UK or firm profile focus on just family office). Canoe is the only firm that provides this solution to the entirety of the market across all those segments and the only one that does it globally.

We think that’s valuable because our platform is machine learning and AI-based; the more data we see, the smarter/better/faster it gets. We cover today about 44,000 active funds across 850,000 commitments. That creates almost immediate time-to-value for new clients and ensures data quality and comprehensiveness meets the standards of everyone in the space.

The other piece is new product functionality. The more we hear across the space, the better our product gets. For example, two years ago, we launched a product focused on managing data associated with the underlying portfolio company investments of these funds. If you’re an investor in a Blackstone fund, you want to know what that fund owns, how much of those companies you own, and if any other funds in your portfolio own those companies. How are they marked relative to one another? Something happens in Ukraine—how much exposure do I have? That request came largely from our most institutional and sophisticated clients. We solved the problem for them and then went to our wealth managers and single-family offices and said, “Look, we now have the ability to give you a view into your aggregate portfolio right at your fingertips.” That notion of shared benefit across all these clients and regions is really powerful.

[00:24:00] Gus: How have you tackled that granularity? Portfolio software has been around for a while. Have you gone about acquiring existing businesses or built from the ground up?

[00:24:20] Mike: We’ve always built from the ground up, even some of our new AI technology in the LLM space. It’s been a strategic choice; there are pros and cons (it takes money and time), but we think owning it outright is better at the stage we’re at. I do think we’re at the inflection point where we’re established enough and have a foundation across team, investors, and clients that allows us to start thinking about how to bolt on businesses. Are there firms with synergies where 1+1=3? I’m excited about that. I think our approach to inorganic growth is likely to change in the coming years.

[00:26:06] Gus: There’s an obvious conversation for us here because in 2026, we’re opening up the AYU fund and deal listing platform to more than just a small handful of funds. So creating a standard of reporting from pre-trade capital markets and marketing into the actual allocation side—smoothing that road or the bridge between the chasm—would be an incredibly powerful thing to do.

[00:26:45] Mike: Yeah, I agree. Access is one thing, and that’s tough to create—so to the extent you guys have that platform, that’s unique. Making that as easy as possible facilitates that. I completely agree.

[00:27:22] Gus: If we can get there now—what we’re trying to build and hopefully open up the pipe to you guys—is that when a deal or fund comes through, typically they go, “Okay, here’s 500 family offices that are family offices.” Whereas what we do is say, “Okay, we’ll put a deal or fund through our platform and get a response from our LLM saying we’ve got six family offices interested in this right now because we’ve spoken to them and they’re actively allocating.” Shortening that gap and reducing the amount of investment going into processing those things makes so much sense.

[00:28:17] Mike: Totally.

[00:28:19] Gus: Okay, I’m going to stop talking about AYU for a second. I want to take a slight side step and go about your funding journey and shareholding within Canoe. Every time we work with a partner and present them to family offices, they go, “Is there an equity opportunity here?” One, you’re servicing our membership base, but two, our members are the people that invest in you as well. Can you give me a bit of color on the journey, round sizes, valuations—as much as you can give up?

[00:29:01] Mike: We’ve been really fortunate to bring on amazing partners. We spun out of the family office Portage Partners in 2018; they provided a fantastic seed alongside a number of individuals who had a vested interest in making this a success. As we started seeing success, we started working with Hamilton Lane and Nasdaq in different capacities. It was very clear there was a strategic opportunity to align interests further, so they led our Series A as mentioned. They invested off balance sheet. They understood the space and the problem we were solving. They also gave us a really nice perspective on the market and their networks.

About a year or a year and a half later, we opportunistically found ourselves in a fundraising round for our Series C. We had a significant amount of inbound interest as we were building new products. Our Series C was led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity. Very similar to the F-Prime concept (F-Prime and Eight Roads, part of the Fidelity family, joined our Series B), we wanted institutional expertise—that scale-up type profile. Eight Roads is global in nature, which was right around the time we meaningfully launched in Europe; they were really helpful in navigating the regulatory environment and setup.

What that means going forward, I don’t know. My sense is we’ll continue on the path of the traditional Series D type investor—growth equity, late-stage VC institutions. We’re certainly not closed off to talk to firms and clients about strategic investment.

[00:35:55] Gus: You mentioned secondaries a few times. This is a slice of the market that is fascinating right now because it’s nascent and largely untapped. In a situation where you have an enormous institution coming in at a Series D, a family office might want to put 10 million in, but that’s not going to move the needle much—but a secondary offering within that is quite interesting. Where do you see secondaries in this market?

[00:36:31] Mike: I think there’s only going to be growth in the secondary space. Some of our largest clients are secondaries funds, and they’re dealing with the same challenge—they come in late, but then have to go through the same reporting process. Because the IPO dynamic has slowed, there’s not a whole lot of liquidity or exits. Contributions far outweigh distributions. So firms are no doubt looking for liquidity, and secondaries are a way to engineer that. I think there’s no question we’ll see more of that. You’re right, 10 million dollars may not move the needle as a lead investor, but to come alongside a large institutional investor in a Series D and take some secondary—that’s really interesting. You’ll probably start to see that on the platform.

[00:38:26] Gus: It comes up in our investment round every time—initial investors looking for opportunities and incoming investors also looking for opportunities. One of our founding investors has a secondary fund in Australia, which is again a nascent market. So that’s really exciting.

Mike, we’re running out of time. Can we finish up by telling me—people ask us every week—what does Canoe mean? Where did Canoe come from and why that?

[00:39:05] Mike: Yes, this is a good one! So the founding, incubating family office is called Portage Partners. The principal of that business, Michael Lefebvre, is a Canadian guy who was a managing partner at Davidson Kempner for years. When he created his own family office, he used the term “to portage”—which is to basically take a canoe and traverse overland between two waterways to get to your next destination. As a Canadian and an outdoorsman, that just resonated.

As they were incubating the technology, they just referred to it as “the tech” or “the platform.” Finally, they said, “Look, we gotta put a name to this,” and started referring to it as Canoe, sort of tongue-in-cheek. When we came in, we looked at the technology and said we need to carve this out and commercialize it. Our first week, naming and branding went to the bottom of the list because we felt we had a name we could work with. We appended “Intelligence” to it because we’re bringing intelligence to an otherwise opaque process and industry.

Now, our first marketing advisor we hired said, “We love the Canoe name! A canoe takes treasured goods from an upstream location downstream and delivers those goods—that’s exactly what you do! You take documents and deliver that prize information downstream.” We loved it and went with it, but if only we had that much forethought into why we came up with the name! It works, it’s worked well for us. Early on, the SEO was not great—you search for “Canoe” and we were on page three of Google—but that’s changed over time.

[00:41:30] Gus: Well, you know, it’s not “Green Tree Asset Management Data Offering.” There used to be—I don’t know if the website is still up—the Hedge Fund Name Generator website, which would just be like BlackRock, GreenTree, Capital Management, Assets Management… or you name it after some Latin derivation. “Canoe” is monolithic—I’m a big fan of branding—it sits there basically.

Mike, we can’t wait to work with you more next year. We’ve got so much to do. Europe, America, Middle East… we’re working on our family office summits in Switzerland, London, the Caribbean. We tried to get you on the recent thai-one, but we’ve got more coming next year. We’re really looking forward to connecting with you and connecting you with our members into 2026 and beyond.

[00:42:36] Mike: As are we, and we appreciate it. I look forward to being at a few of the events next year.

[00:42:46] Gus: We’ll get there. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you for your time. Speak to you soon.

[00:42:50] Mike: Take care. Cheers. Happy holidays.

[00:42:53] [Video ends]