Bridge, an AI-native operating system designed for private markets allocators, announced that it has raised $5.1 million in seed financing led by Thicket Ventures, with participation from investors across the private equity and wealth management sectors.
The funding will enable Bridge to expand its team and accelerate the rollout of its platform, which consolidates end-to-end workflows for managing, evaluating, and accessing alternative investments into one unified system.
Bridge was founded by Alex Goodwin, formerly of Leonard Green & Partners, and Ayo Ekhator, ex-Blackstone Group, alongside a founding engineering team from Microsoft, Uber, and Plaid. The company is already serving some of the most sophisticated investors in private markets, including wealth management firms, RIAs, family offices, and institutional allocators.
The company’s platform uses AI to automate traditionally manual, fragmented processes within private markets—streamlining document aggregation, data extraction, and analytics. Bridge’s goal is to empower allocators with infrastructure that integrates business intelligence, post-trade operations, and pre-trade decision-making.
Bridge’s investors include a strategic mix of industry veterans such as Bill Lewis (ex-Lazard, ex-Morgan Stanley), Bob White (Bain Capital), Nate Sleeper (CD&R), Dani Fava (Carson Group), Ed Swenson (Dynasty), Molly Bennard (ex-Focus Financial), Peter Lee (Summit Trail Advisors), Chris Piazza (KKR, ex-iCapital), and David Hauser (Vanilla).
As part of the financing, Justin Wisz, Founder and General Partner of Thicket Ventures, will join Bridge’s Board of Directors. The partnership brings additional strategic support as Bridge seeks to redefine the infrastructure supporting the rapidly growing $30 trillion alternative investments market.
The seed round follows Bridge’s earlier friends-and-family funding, raised while Goodwin and Ekhator were incubating the idea during their time at Harvard Business School. After gaining early market traction, they connected with Thicket Ventures to scale their vision.
KEY QUOTES
“AI is enabling us to fundamentally reimagine the infrastructure on which alternative investments are operated. We are in the midst of a major inflection point at the intersection of private markets and technology – demand for the asset class continues to skyrocket, while the commercial application of AI has unlocked a new standard for analyzing and reporting on these investments with ease. Bridge is emerging as the platform of choice to address what is a category-defining opportunity.”
Alex Goodwin, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Bridge
“Bridge is solving the hardest problems for allocators to private markets with an end-to-end solution that scales independently by using AI at its core. We see Bridge as the leader of a new paradigm, capitalizing on two of the most relevant trends in finance: the modernization of technology in wealth management and the proliferation of alternative investing. The macro tailwinds behind alts are well demonstrated, and as such, we have been looking for a leading management team to back for some time. Bridge is the most impressive company we have seen in this space, both for the technical capability of its founding team and their novel solution to the operational challenges that RIA’s, family offices and institutions face every day in the $30T market for alternative investments.”
Justin Wisz, Founder and General Partner, Thicket Ventures
“When considering who to partner with, we were extremely focused on putting investors around the table who could add tangible value with their operating experience and industry relationships in a way that would measurably impact the company. Alongside our supportive group of angel investors, Justin and Thicket’s network of strategic LPs stood out from the pack during our fundraising process. We’re thrilled to be working together.”
Ayo Ekhator, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, Bridge
