Investors & partners

The market in one minute

A GP (general partner) runs a private fund and charges fees — think Blackstone, KKR, or a 10-person credit fund.
An LP (limited partner) puts up the money — pensions, insurers, regional banks, family offices. Almost all LPs are institutions.
The LP's only view of the fund is a quarterly PDF the GP writes about itself. Nobody independently checks it.

Why this is real

>50%

SEC exam findings on PE fee handling

$121M+

Blackstone, Apollo, KKR settlements combined

73%

LPs citing inconsistent reporting

Fee validation is a proven business: Colmore built it with people, served 1,400+ LPs, and was acquired by Preqin. We rebuild it with AI at a fraction of the cost — and in Japanese.

This isn't hypothetical money.

LACERA ($52.5B pension) was found overcharged on carried interest across more than 40% of its fund commitments.
One Colmore case: a single waterfall error, unnoticed for years, returned $1.2M of NAV to one LP in one fund.
SEC fee cases forced reimbursements from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars each — and regulators only examine a fraction of funds. 90% of LPs rank hidden costs as a top-two concern.
Blackstone's settlement alone returned ~$29M to fund investors.

Every documented recovery was found by regulators or manual reviewers. Software has barely entered the room.

What Blacknorth does

When a report arrives, we re-compute every number — fees vs. the LPA, NAV vs. cash flows, statements vs. each other — and return signed, auditable results.

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How we charge (with numbers).

Subscription: 2–5bp of monitored commitments per year, minimum $30K per client.
Worked example: a regional bank with $330M across 30 funds → ~3bp → $100K/yr.
Recovery share: 15–20% of overcharges we find. First-year backlog reviews find the most — we model recovery as customer-acquisition fuel, not an annuity.
In practice: one documented waterfall error returned $1.2M to one LP in one fund; a $52.5B pension was overcharged on carry across 40%+ of its fund commitments.
Unit economics target: gross margin >70% at scale (LLM extraction + deterministic checks; human review only on low-confidence items).

Market size

The engine is fund-agnostic: any GP report, any geography, any asset class — PE, private credit, real estate, infrastructure. The market is every LP holding private fund positions, not just buyers of US funds.

Bps on monitored assets (how we actually price)

Global private markets AUM held by LPs: ~$13–15T
Addressable share (excl. mega-LPs with in-house teams, GP-affiliated capital): ~50% → ~$7T
Verification pricing: 1–3bp of monitored assets
→ Core market ≈ $0.7–2B/yr
at 1bp: $0.7B · at 2bp: $1.4B · at 3bp: $2.1B

Where the verified data goes next.

Pre-investment diligence. LPA fee-term review before the LP signs — same engine, same buyer, earlier in the lifecycle.
The data layer. An anonymized fee & terms benchmark built from verified reports. Preqin — a private-markets data company — sold to BlackRock for $3.2B in 2024.
The money layer. Capital-call execution and LP treasury — from reading documents to handling flows. Opens fund administration, a multi-billion-dollar industry.
Endgame. "Independently verified" becomes the standard GPs report against — the audit playbook.

Who and what we're looking for

Design partners: 2–3 allocators. We verify a few funds free; you keep whatever we find.
Introductions: investment / risk / planning teams at regional banks, insurers, corporate pensions, family offices.
People: an advisor or co-founder from fund administration, trust banking, or fund audit; licensed audit/CPA professionals.
Capital: pre-seed/seed to fund the first design-partner cycle and SOC 2 / ISMS.

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