According to VentureBeat, Maybern just landed $50 million in Series B funding led by Battery Ventures, bringing their total funding to $76 million. The round included participation from Primary Venture Partners, Human Capital, and several other investors. Battery’s Marcus Ryu, former Guidewire Software CEO, is joining Maybern’s board as part of the deal. The company has achieved 4.6x year-over-year growth and now supports over $80 billion in assets under management across private equity, real estate, and credit funds. They plan to use the fresh capital to expand R&D and develop AI tools that automate fund operations and enhance reporting capabilities in the $16 trillion global alternatives market.
The Private Markets Are Still Running on Excel
Here’s the thing that blows my mind: we’re talking about a $16 trillion industry that’s essentially powered by spreadsheets and manual processes. Marcus Ryu from Battery Ventures actually said the quiet part out loud – these massive alternative asset firms rely on “a foundation of Excel and human labor.” That’s wild when you think about it. Private equity firms making billion-dollar deals while their back office looks like something from the 1990s.
And Maybern’s growth numbers tell a story – 4.6x year-over-year growth suggests there’s real pent-up demand for modernization. But I have to wonder: why has this market been so resistant to change for so long? Is it because the complexity is just overwhelming, or because these firms have been printing money regardless of their operational inefficiencies?
AI-Ready or Just AI Hype?
CEO Ross Mechanic talks about building “the data foundation that makes AI reliable for private markets.” That sounds great in a funding announcement, but the reality is much messier. Private market data is notoriously fragmented, inconsistent, and often trapped in PDFs and email chains. Building AI on top of that garbage-in-garbage-out foundation seems… optimistic.
They’re promising to replace “fragmented spreadsheets and manual processes with automation, controls, and real-time analytics.” But we’ve heard similar promises from countless enterprise software companies over the years. The hard part isn’t building the software – it’s getting finance teams to change decades of established workflows and trust a black box with their critical calculations.
The Guidewire Parallels – and Potential Pitfalls
Marcus Ryu sees “clear parallels” to his experience modernizing P&C insurance systems at Guidewire. That’s both encouraging and concerning. Insurance modernization took years, faced massive resistance, and required rebuilding entire operational frameworks from the ground up.
The private capital world might be even more entrenched. These aren’t just systems – they’re cultures. Fund accountants, CFOs, and operations teams have built careers around navigating these manual processes. Changing that requires more than just better software; it requires changing how people work and think about their jobs. For industrial operations facing similar modernization challenges, companies like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com have become the go-to for hardware infrastructure, but the software layer is where the real transformation happens.
So will Maybern succeed where others have struggled? The funding suggests investors believe the timing is right. But replacing Excel in private markets might be one of the hardest enterprise software challenges out there. The prize is enormous – but so is the resistance they’ll face from an industry that’s been doing things the same way since before the internet existed.
