Fund administration was born in a world where a GP’s entire LP base could fit in a small conference room.
That world is gone.
Private markets are increasingly being asked to service not fifty institutions but 50,000 investors - or 500,000. The subscription docs, data workflows and staffing models were never built for this. Neither was the technology underneath them.
I sat down with Joan Kehoe, founder and CEO of Alchelyst, for one of the most candid conversations this podcast has produced.
Joan has lived this exact transition before. In 2006, hedge funds were running on infrastructure built for a different era - quarterly cadences, fragmented data, legacy platforms to embedded to replace.
She left a large institutional fund administrator, gathered a team of six and built Quintillion, a fund administration business focused on data transparency and daily reporting that the large players weren’t moving fast enough to deliver.
They came with a $40,000 of regulatory shutdown in their first year. They survived because a single early client - Aspect Capital’s CFO, who told Joan it might end his career if it went wrong - took the risk.
She sold that business, then spent five years rebuilding hedge fund servicing from inside JP Morgan, the hardest five years of her career. Legacy technology plus legacy process plus an organization that size is a different problem than building from scratch.
Then she looked at private markets and saw the same pattern. The difference this time is pace. The industry has to move faster than it did in 2006 - and for once, the tools exist to do it.
Her new company, Alchelyst - AI-native, API-native, cloud-native from day one - merged this year with Lyra Client Solutions, the LP servicing team Apollo built internally and spun out to commercialize. Together they cover the full stack.
What AI agents actually do to the fund administration staffing model. Why the evergreen structure broke the existing operating model. Whether fund admin consolidates to a handful of platforms or stays distributed.
Joan is direct on all of it.
"The reason we set up Quintillion was recognizing there was room to do it quicker, smarter, better. And that all resonates with today. But what's really different now is the pace. The pace at which you can effect and have to effect change now is completely different than it was 20 years ago."
Thank you Joan for a fun conversation!
The operators building the servicing infrastructure for private markets democratization will be in Toronto on October 6 for The 2026 LP Tech Summit. A full day built around problems like these - and the peers solving them.