Fund administration powers trillions of dollars in global assets. Every capital call, distribution, waterfall calculation, LP report, and audit trace runs through it. A botched reconciliation or a delayed capital call can damage LP relationships that took years to build. The stakes are enormous. The infrastructure is not.
Most funds run their back office on general ledgers built for entirely different businesses, accounting done across a patchwork of spreadsheets that multiply every time a new entity gets added, and a roster of credentialed fund accountants spending most of their day on work that follows the same rules every time. The people doing this work are talented. The systems they're forced to use are not. SS&C has a $20B market cap serving this market the old way. That tells you everything about the size of the opportunity, and everything about how overdue it is for a fundamentally different approach.
Today, we're announcing that Emergence has led Hanover Park's $27M Series A, alongside Lux Capital and Susa Ventures.
Rebuilding the Stack from Scratch
Most companies attacking this space have taken the easier path. They build an automation layer on top of existing infrastructure, sell it as a SaaS tool, and let the fund figure out the rest.
Hanover Park did something harder and more ambitious. Co-founders Chris Hladczuk and Nick Puljic built the general ledger, the waterfall engine, the investor portal, and the portfolio management layer from scratch. Because when you own the full stack, when every piece of data flows through systems you built, you can let AI actually do the work. You're not bolting intelligence onto legacy plumbing. You're designing the plumbing around intelligence.
Chris has a phrase for what the legacy model requires: human duct tape. Hundreds of people holding together processes that technology should be handling. Hanover Park replaces that duct tape with purpose-built software and AI, while keeping expert fund accountants in the loop for the judgment calls that matter. The accountants review what the system prepares, catch edge cases, and ensure accuracy that funds can stake their LP relationships on.
The results speak for themselves. Hanover Park grew from $1 billion to $15 billion in assets under administration in under twelve months. They completed a migration for Asylum Ventures, covering 30+ legal entities and a decade of historical data, in 100 hours. The industry standard for that work is measured in months.
Customer Obsession as a Competitive Advantage
Chris is relentlessly focused on his customers' success. He famously sleeps in customers' offices to ensure successful deployment. After a particularly intense stretch, he came by my house and napped on my couch while my daughter kept watch.
That level of obsession tends to be a signal. And in fund administration, it's also a strategy. Once a fund migrates to Hanover Park, their LPs interact with the investor portal, their auditors pull from the system, and their internal reporting flows through it. Earning that trust requires the kind of founder who will personally guarantee that no data point falls through the cracks during migration. Chris is that founder.
AI-Native Services Is the New Playbook
This is what we at Emergence call an AI-native service. Hanover Park doesn't sell software to funds and walk away. They take on the outcome. The customer buys a result and is indifferent to whether it's performed by a human, AI, or some hybrid of the two. Hanover Park is the single point of responsibility.
As the AI improves, each accountant can serve more funds, margins expand, and the service gets faster and cheaper. That compounding dynamic is what makes this venture-backable in a way that traditional fund admin never was.
We've been building our conviction around AI-native services for the past two years. We first wrote about this model in April 2024, when we argued that AI-native companies would core out the incumbent services conglomerates. We have now invested behind this thesis across multiple industries: Mechanical Orchard in tech consulting, Strala in insurance claims processing, Harper in commercial insurance brokerage, Prosper AI in healthcare revenue cycle management, and now Hanover Park in fund administration.
The pattern across all of these investments is the same. The most defensible businesses being built right now own outcomes and get held accountable for them. Fund administration fits that model as well as anything we've seen. The work is high-volume, deeply rule-based, and consequential enough that buyers need someone to own the result. The incumbent model scales linearly with headcount. The AI-native model compounds.
We've been documenting what we're learning about this model in our AI-Native Services Playbook, which we update every six months. A significant update is coming soon, shaped in large part by what we’re seeing from companies like Hanover Park. Chris and the Hanover Park team have been close collaborators in shaping those learnings, and we've learned an enormous amount from watching them build.
Chris and Nick built the right architecture. They've proven they can deliver at a pace the industry has never seen.
We're proud to lead this round and join them for what comes next.
Welcome to the Emergence family, Chris, Nick, and the entire team.
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