New tool gives RIAs and family offices AI help vetting private market deals, with some users reportedly halving review time.
Arch, the New York-based technology platform for private markets investors, is extending its artificial intelligence tools beyond portfolio monitoring and into pre-investment due diligence in a move aimed at registered investment advisors and family offices sorting through a growing stream of private deals.
The company announced the launch of Arch Investment Research, a product that reads offering materials, pulls out key terms and flags the items an investment team should examine. Each extracted term links back to its source document so it can be audited, and the diligence file carries over once a deal closes, keeping the original terms and investment thesis in view for as long as the position is held.
Until now, Arch’s software has done its work after a client commits capital – gathering documents, extracting data, processing capital calls, the requests fund managers send when they draw down committed money, and producing portfolio insights across private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, real estate and other private holdings. With the new capability, firms are able to test prospective investments against criteria they set themselves.
“The private market experience shouldn’t be fragmented across diligence, data, workflows, and portfolio monitoring,” said Ryan Eisenman, Arch’s co-founder and chief executive. “Arch is expanding our private markets expertise to support pre-investment diligence, allowing investment teams to compare private market opportunities against their own criteria to make smarter allocation decisions.”
Arch said some RIAs and family offices already using the product have reduced diligence time by as much as 50% per opportunity.
It added that early partners have saved thousands of hours by pinpointing which analyses deserved priority before advancing a deal.
Investment Research can be bought on its own or bundled with Arch’s existing products for alternatives data management, capital calls and reporting. The firm plugs into clients’ existing systems through application programming interfaces and said it is taking the same approach as AI enters allocators’ daily routines, so users can work with private markets data inside the systems and large language models they already use.
The product arrives as more advisors build allocations to private equity and other alternatives into client portfolios, leaving many practices wrestling with paper-heavy onboarding and reporting.
In July, Arch named Keith Soura chief technology officer, handing him oversight of architecture, engineering and product delivery for a client base that includes banks, investment advisors, accounting firms, family offices and institutional allocators. Soura previously led engineering at mortgage fintech Better.com and served as CTO of proptech company VERO.
That same month, Arch revealed MUFG Innovation Partners and Franklin Templeton among previously undisclosed backers of its $52 million Series B round. At the time, the firm said assets on its platform had doubled to reach $539 million, though it now puts that figure at more than $600 billion across over 650 allocators, including four of the top 20 banks and eight of the top 20 accounting firms.