How I Invest with David Weisburd
E169: How to Build an Enduring Private Equity Franchise w/Alex Robinson
Mon, 02 Jun 2025
Alex Robinson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Juniper Square, a company transforming the private markets through technology and service. In this episode, we go deep into how he and his co-founders saw the opportunity to modernize fund administration, why the private markets are decades behind the public markets, and how Juniper Square is building for the future with AI agents. We also discuss how the best GPs scale trust with LPs, why the retail channel still hasn’t arrived in full force, and the challenges of building a system of record in a fragmented industry.
Chapter 1: What are the best practices for GPs to scale trust with LPs?
What have been the best practices in terms of GPs that have been able to scale their trusted relationships with LPs and build real platform?
They care very deeply about how their investments are portrayed, about the quality of information they're getting to LPs, about the frequency, about the timeliness, because they believe that this represents their brand and it represents part of the trust building that they're in the business of conveying.
Today, I'm excited to welcome Alex Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Juniper Square, the leading investment management platform for the private funds industry. Alex is a serial entrepreneur who has raised over $100 million to transform how real estate and private equity firms raise, manage, and report capital, as well as most critically, build lasting relationships with LPs.
We'll explore his journey from Microsoft to building Juniper Square, his vision for digitizing private markets, and how he's driving innovation to one of the world's largest markets. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Alex. Tell me about how you started Juniper Square over a decade ago.
It was my third startup. So I learned what I'd made some mistakes with the first two, which were in the clean tech field. And I'd made a little bit of money from my second startup. And so the genesis for Juniper Square was my experience as an LP. investing into private funds. I did a direct real estate deal and they sent a FedEx truck to my house with a stack of paperwork two inches thick.
I invested in a real estate fund, same story, truck coming to my house with paper. I invested in a venture fund, same story. And I just was shocked that in 2013, summer of 2013, I could trade stocks online. I could do my healthcare online. I could buy shoes online.
The whole world had moved to cloud and had moved to digital, except for the private markets industry, which was still shuffling paper around on vans and trucks. And it just seemed to me that it's not like the industry was two or three years behind. It was like 20 years behind where the public markets were.
And what was clear to me at that point was the private markets were going to come to look like the public markets. They were going to be efficient like the public markets. There was going to be the same degree of transparency, same degree of liquidity.
And you were going to be able to execute these complex trades, investing into a private markets fund, a venture fund, private equity fund, real estate fund, et cetera. By clicking buttons in a web browser, just like you could do in the public markets.
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Chapter 2: How did Alex Robinson start Juniper Square?
So we wanted to have the most narrow type of customer possible. And even though the variations across GPs, across asset classes, from the perspective of investor relations fund administration, they don't matter very much. Obviously, the investing strategy is very different of what it is to be a venture capitalist versus a real estate fund manager.
But when you talk about the operations of the fund and the accounting and the tax and the compliance and the movement of money, it's very similar across all the asset classes.
So a big part of the reason that we focused on a single type of customer was because across private markets, people consider their peer set to be those who invest similarly to them, which is just to say a venture capitalist does not consider a real estate investor to be their peer just because they both invest out of closed end investments. Private funds.
They consider their peers to be other venture capitalists that they interface with, do business with, compete for deals with, et cetera. And so if you want to build customer momentum, if you want to build density, if you want to have a sense of rapid adoption, really narrowing down to a single type of customer where they all know each other, they're going to be talking, helps with that.
And that's the other reason we chose real estate. And then since, we've brought in to serve all private markets asset classes, really except hedge funds. So we don't have a current practice of going to market in a dedicated way for hedge funds. We do support some, maybe a few dozen funds out of our tens of thousands, but it's not a current focus area for us.
Otherwise, every private market's asset class from commercial real estate to venture capital, to private equity, to private credit, to crypto, to natural resources like ag and infrastructure and real assets. We've got customers across all those categories.
Many lessons there, Tonpak, for founders wanting to build large organizations like Juniper Square. One is you focused on half a product, not a half-assed product. That's a Jason Fried quote from 37 Signals. It's the idea that build a great product for one segment of the market versus a pretty good product for a lot of people.
You want those early users and you want those early advocates for your product. Although fund admin isn't truly a marketplace, you focus very heavily on network effects and word of mouth. Which market can we gain enough market share and penetration quickly so that people start referencing each other? And even though you might be small by number of
customers, you had a certain amount of critical mass within the industry.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Alex face when modernizing private markets?
And then what we do is we use almost all of our own infrastructure, almost all of our own software tooling inside of our operations. So all of the data and all of the investor interfaces, all the compliance rails, the payments rails, all the reporting interface, the communications system, every PDF that's produced, all of it's produced on Juniper Square code.
The one exception is our general ledger. We use a third party general ledger and then we have a very deep integration with that third party general ledger. So our accountants are doing their work inside of Juniper Square and that's their dashboard for understanding everything about the fund, it's metadata, it's reporting, all of it.
Many things to unpack there. You mentioned this institutional knowledge that goes with a fund accountant associated with a certain fund. How do you institutionalize that within Juniper Square? And is there a way to generalize that knowledge or institutionalize that within Juniper Square?
You might say, well, what are the things you want to know about a fund? What's its metadata? So you'd say, okay, well, I've got hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents written in legal language, and I need to extract all of the semantic meaning and the you know, metrics and the logic from this form, which is a legal agreement and get it into the software code so that I can work with it, right?
So for example, one of the things that the legal agreement will spell out is what's commonly known as the waterfall in a fund, right? Which is basically thought of as who gets what money and when, right? So sometimes there's a rate of return that the GP has to clear before profits start getting split. Sometimes there's different share classes among investors.
And so share class A will get some amount of money before share class B does and so forth. And so it's just a piece of logic that explains how the profits from a fund flow. Well, that starts out written as legal language and you extract that legal language and encode it in software so that you're now doing math based on the logic that was established in that legal agreement.
And so that general property is true across not just the waterfall, but lots and lots of sort of rules, so to speak, or logic about how the fund works.
And so we have a lot of software that we've built over the years that helps with that extraction, helps with things like waterfall automation, automates the subscription process for the investors so that when you're bringing the investor into the fund, you're gathering all the data. that you need from them.
And then the benefit of seeing the network effect that's inherent in private markets is that we have 600,000 unique LPs on Juniper Square across millions of positions. So on average, we have multiple positions per LP. So this means a typical LP signs into Juniper Square and then they have many GPs and many investments that they're centrally managing through one Juniper Square account.
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