Private credit has spent the past year being called opaque.
Some of that is structural. Credit managers often can’t demand different reporting from the companies they lend to, which leaves them where an LP sits: taking what they’re given.
The rest looks familiar… Disclosure norms are thin next to private equity’s, the tools are scarce and Excel is still the default.
Especially now - amid 12 months of consistent pressure - LPs want more.
Private equity was in a similar position after 2008: The data its LPs demanded next helped turn secondaries from an $8 billion market into a roughly $170 billion one today.
I sat down with Charlie Tafoya, Co-Founder and CEO of Chronograph, on the Modern Capital Podcast.
He was a summer analyst at Morgan Stanley in 2008. When Lehman collapsed, he lost his offer and eventually landed at Merrill Lynch, working on data center deals. Then Pantheon, investing in secondaries back when they were a small corner of private equity.
(Data centers and secondaries are two of this year’s biggest stories in private capital, and Charlie was in both long before the headlines!)
From that seat, he watched LPs start asking for more than a capital account statement. They wanted performance figures and valuation methodologies, and they wanted them more often.
Every institution needed the same thing, and the available technology was, in his words, fundamentally lacking. So Charlie, a self-described computer nerd, saw a way to bring all that data together.
“I was up for VP at Pantheon, so I definitely had the private equity career track laid out right before me. But yeah, I ultimately quit on a Friday, actually got married on Saturday and then started coding literally on Monday. So my father-in-law didn't know that I had left my private equity job at the altar.”
Ten years later, Chronograph provides data management, valuations and analytics technology for institutional private capital investors. Eight of the 10 largest GPs now use its software, as do five of the 10 largest LPs.
Seventeen years on Wall Street taught him one thing above the rest: the whole system is built on trust.
Chronograph is designed around it, and software like it is still rare in private credit.
By Charlie’s count, portfolio monitoring software has about 3% penetration in private credit. Among private equity GPs, it’s roughly 40%.
A few more things we cover:
Raising $143 million at peak SaaSpocalypse fear, and why he asks his team to be 8% less comfortable
Why there's no objectively right way to classify pre-IPO Uber, and why that's healthy
Why the founder of a data company argues against industry reporting standards
Who counts as a pure-play LP anymore, and what that does to the line between LP and GP software
Why an RIA may not be equipped to pick managers, and what has to exist first
Whether private credit resembles 2008, and the test Charlie applies whenever markets come under stress
Private credit now faces the data demands private equity faced after 2008. Charlie has watched this movie before.
In private markets, every LP builds its own data layer. The 2026 LP Tech Summit brings together the institutional allocators and technology leaders doing that work.
Chronograph’s Andrew Kehl is on the data layer panel with Allstate, Guardian Life, EnvestHub and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.