In An Effort To Serve Venture Capital Investors,  JPMorgan Chase Buys Startup Data Platform

Aumni, a provider of data analytics for startup investors, is being acquired by JPMorgan Chase as part of its growth strategy.

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Michael Elanjian, who heads JPMorgan's digital private markets efforts, says the bank is buying the Utah-based company as part of a larger push to deepen relationships with venture capitalists.

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The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a source close to JPMorgan says they will pay about the startup's last fundraising valuation in 2021, which is roughly what JPMorgan will pay. Pitchbook reports that after the round, Aumni had a value of $232 million.

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A number of fintech companies have been acquired by JPMorgan under CEO Jamie Dimon in recent years. The Bank has bought a half-dozen startups since 2020 to bolster its capabilities in various areas that span payments to sustainable investments, including the capital markets. Acrimonious legal disputes over a 2021 acquisition and the bank's rising expenses have recently led to the bank's technology investments coming under scrutiny recently.

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Changing Excel

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JPMorgan Chase chose to acquire Aumni after leading its 2021 investment round, as reported by Elanjian. Aumni is a platform that provides users with an easy-to-use dashboard for analyzing and understanding their holdings. It was founded by a former corporate lawyer, Tony Lewis, in 2018.

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Microsoft is still used by the majority of the venture capital industry

 The fact that funds have to rely on Excel or other similar software programs to track investments in portfolio companies can make gaining insights into them difficult, says Lewis, since equity rounds can be composed of several hundred pages of dense legal language.

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According to Lewis, when it comes to conducting any sort of data-science inquiry into your existing investment activity, it becomes quite a large undertaking to track down all the relevant information to use, be able to feed it accurately into Excel, and then be able to use it in your initiatives," Lewis explained.

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"Investing in any private alternative asset, in which your economics and legal rights reside, poses a challenge to anyone investing in it because it is based on a private contract," said Goulding. "It is based on a private contract.

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SVB Crashes

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Aumni has been a popular investment choice for startups in recent weeks after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank caused shockwaves throughout the startup community. It was at this time that venture capitalists began to become concerned over the possibility of uninsured deposits at midsized banks, and asked where their portfolio companies were deposited and whether they could inspect their financial books legally, according to Lewis.

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Aumni may also be used by investors in venture capital firms to avoid errors that may occur due to buried key details in legal paperwork that are missing or incorrect.

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As part of its plan to use the startup, Lewis said the company has collected data on almost 18,000 portfolio companies valued at almost $3.6 trillion and there is a subscription fee of $25 per year based on how much money the firm manages and how many companies it tracks.

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According to Elanjian, the bank's new employee stock plan service will be integrated into Capital Connect, another JPMorgan platform that came out of stealth mode last year, and the new service will also complement the bank's acquisition of Global Shares, which helps employers manage employee stock plans.

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As a digital destination, Capital Connect aims to attract VCs, entrepreneurs, and other investors. It now has 200 employees and about 850 clients.

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In addition to the venture community, we want to serve the private markets by providing an end-to-end ecosystem.