Gridline, an alternative investment tech platform launched in 2022, has hired Chris Crawford as the startup’s first chief operating officer. Crawford joins after six years at CAIS, where he served as managing director of its fund management platform and COO of CAIS Advisors, its investment management subsidiary.
The news follows Gridline’s Series A funding round, in which it raised $18.5 million earlier this year, led by financial technology venture firm FINTOP, bringing its total funding to $27.5 million. Crawford’s hire signals Gridline’s doubling down on scaling operations and infrastructure as demand for private markets in the wealth segment continues to grow.
“Gridline is an early-stage alternative investment platform, and I feel my appointment as chief operating officer is important at this stage of the company,” Crawford said. “I have always seen myself as a builder and someone who has focused on building for scale and institutionalizing. At Gridline, the opportunity to join at an early stage and influence the direction of the company was a very attractive opportunity for me.”
In the new role, Crawford will be responsible for leading platform operations and infrastructure. He’ll also focus on scaling the company’s custom funds, data management and AltComply, its AI-powered diligence capability.
AltComply automates document ingestion, standardizes analysis and surfaces key risks to help advisors evaluate private investments. It also aims to help advisors with cash-flow modeling and put together growth and pacing plans.
Crawford will also help Gridline launch new capabilities, including its planned liquidity and credit marketplace. He’ll also lead the company’s expansion into the Northeast.
When Gridline launched in 2022, it set out to create an integrated suite to help private wealth firms build, manage and scale an alternative investments program. The firm is now moving to build “intelligence and judgment” into the pre- and post-investment workflow.
“Private markets in the wealth channel are still run on fragmented, legacy infrastructure, and it’s holding firms back,” Gridline CEO Logan Henderson said in a statement. “We built Gridline to replace that with a single, modern platform. Chris has scaled these systems firsthand, and his leadership will accelerate our push to eliminate operational drag and give advisors the infrastructure they actually need to win in the next phase of growth.”
To be sure, there are other alternative investment platforms focused squarely on serving retail financial advisors, such as CAIS, iCapital, Opto and SUBSCRIBE, among others. In addition, traditional TAMPs such as InvestCloud, Envestnet and others are increasingly adding private markets functionality or integrations with alts platforms.
But Henderson contends the biggest differentiator is Gridline’s proprietary ledger. Instead of having to rely on third-party fund administrators or outside parties that are manually reconciling data, it’s all integrated into one system.
As of January, Gridline had more than 400 wealth management firms on the platform, including Keebeck Wealth Management, Nicholas Hoffman & Co. and Avidian Wealth Solutions.