A LinkedIn for Private Equity Fundraising?
Yesterday I spent some time on the phone with Alex Bangash and Jonathan LaCrosse, who recently launched a new online private equity marketplace called Trusted Insight. The idea is to serve as a sort of LinkedIn for institutional investors, in which they can anonymously offer to buy or sell alternative investment funds and portfolio companies. Here’s how it might work: Imagine I’m an endowment manager looking for some exposure to an early-stage VC fund focused on Brazil. I become a member (after being verified), and type in my parameters. If any such funds are being offered in the system, they will pop up with as much information as the seller wants to disclose. I then “contact” the seller (whose identity I still do not know), who then chooses whether or not to reply (if the seller replies, it would identify itself).
