16th June 2022, London – DealsPlus, the next generation operating platform for private market funds and their portfolios, recently completed a $1.6 million seed capital raise and has grown to a team of ten. The seed round was led by a private investment management firm with $33.0 billion in AUM, with participation from Jeffrey Gelfand, a senior advisor to investment firms and fintech’s in the alternative asset management space. In addition, Jeffrey Gelfand and Chris Webb joined the company as senior advisors.
DealsPlus enables private market funds–private equity, real estate, infrastructure, and debt funds– to standardise and automate deal closings and creates a ‘single source of truth’ across a fund’s investment structures during the holding period. DealsPlus’s intuitive and user-friendly design is purpose built for cross-functional teams– deal, finance, legal, tax, and asset management — to help connect the dots across the current maze of fragmented and unstructured systems and processes. Notably, the platform is designed to help general partners and their portfolios stay ‘transaction ready’ at all times.
Venkat Subramaniam, Founder at DealsPlus, comments: “Having advised private market funds for over 15 years, both as an advisor and in-house, I have seen first-hand the value erosion suffered by GPs due to lack of standardisation and automation in their deal closing and post-deal investment management processes. Our solution resonates with our clients. This seed round enables us to grow the team, help current and new clients scale DealsPlus across their deal execution and investment management processes, and accelerate the execution of our exciting product roadmap.”
Jeffrey Gelfand, Senior Advisor, comments: “Creating, closing and documenting private transactions is typically choppy, with internal and external stakeholders literally “bumping into each other” to execute on their piece of the puzzle… leaving a path of destruction as they all quickly move onto the next transaction. This blackhole of poor hygiene is now fillex because of DealsPlus, a new technology platform that, for the first time, empowers and encourages key stakeholders to work closely together in a common technology platform.”
About DealsPlus: DealPlus is a London based technology firm committed to making the $1.2T+ private transaction market more efficient through its dual product offering of DealsPlus Close and DealsPlus Track. These solutions enable private market funds to: a) standardise and automate deal closings, b) create a ‘single source of truth’ across their investment structures, c) automate compliance and controls, and, d) keep portfolios ‘transaction ready’.
Team: The founding team at DealsPlus has over 40 combined years of private equity and technology experience to tailor a solution for private equity managers.
Our founder, Venkat Subramaniam, has over 15 years of experience advising private equity managers on cross-border transactions, most recently as an Associate Partner at EY UK.
Our co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Padma Shankar, has over 25 years of experience building and scaling high end enterprise technology solutions across multiple domains and for some of the largest enterprises in the world.
DealsPlus has also recently been joined by Ben Stockton. Ben has joined from Ernst & Young where he was a Director in the transactional tax team. Ben specialised in advising private equity managers on the design and implementation of capital structures to accommodate incentive plans for international management teams. His role in managing these capital structures over the past ten years highlighted the real need for the products offered by DealsPlus.
Our dedicated team of software engineers and experienced industry professionals are all passionately committed to creating value to private market fund clients.
About Jeffrey Gelfand: Jeffrey Gelfand offers strategic advisory services to investment management focused fintechs as well as change management consulting to alternative investment firms. Some of his areas of focus include: launch advisory, organization chart health, process and technology blueprinting, insource versus outsource decisioning, CFO coaching and finance organization mentoring as well as compensation benchmarking. Gelfand joined Centerbridge at its inception in 2006 and oversaw the firm’s accounting, tax, operations, investor services and technology functions until his retirement in 2018. Prior to Centerbridge, he was the Chief Financial Officer of Silver Point Capital, AOL Time Warner’s investment company and Evercore. He began his career at Ernst & Young, received a B.B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1988 and qualified as a Certified Public Accountant in New York in 1992. To learn more, visit his LinkedIn.
About Chris Webb: A 15-year veteran of the private markets fintech space, Chris has worked with market-leading fintech products in various capacities (business development/account management, new market expansion, sales engineering, implementation). An American living in London, he started his career at FIS Investran after receiving a B.A from Tulane University in New Orleans, LA, and currently leads the EMEA account management team for DealCloud, an Intapp Company. In addition to DealsPlus, Chris also works closely with founders of other early-stage fintech firms – helping them bring their vision to the private markets.