Private markets grew for decades without obsessing over the investor experience.
A few hundred GP names mattered, and they competed on one number: returns.
There was no pressure to care about reporting quality, data timeliness, or what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a quarterly PDF.
That era is over.
I sat down with Amit Gairola and Griff Norville for a first-of-its-kind conversation on the Modern Capital Podcast: a startup and one of the investors who backed it.
Amit spent a decade at Amazon, where every decision came back to one question: what does this do for the customer?
He brought that question to private markets and built Daphne, a permissioned data layer that makes straight-through data processing a reality between GPs and the allocators, platforms and fund of funds that invest with them.
Griff is Head of Technology Solutions and Co-Head of Innovation at Hamilton Lane, one of the largest allocators in private markets with roughly $1 trillion in assets under management and supervision - and both a backer and live user of Daphne.
He’s watched the industry evolve from one where delivering returns was enough, to one where a new class of investors brings expectations formed by public markets, consumer technology and the Amazon-era assumption that a good experience is simply the baseline.
The problem they’re solving is not a subtle one:
As Griff put it, "The uncomfortable truth in this industry — for all the growth we've had and the improvements that we've made — is that we still operate with PDFs and emails and cumbersome data rooms."
Daphne sits between GPs and the allocators receiving their data, translating fund information from whatever format GPs use and delivering it via API directly into downstream systems.
Hamilton Lane uses it today. Nobody on the investment team touches a data room.
What’s coming next makes this more urgent, not less:
Evergreen funds are moving from quarterly to monthly to daily valuations. The current infrastructure wasn’t built for that cadence.
401(k) access is coming. Secondary markets are scaling. Both require clean, permissioned, real-time data flow before either can work at scale.
Standardization has been tried. It keeps failing. The better bet is translation - AI tools that bridge formats without forcing the market to agree on one.
Private markets has to start treating its investors like customers. Delivering a great LP experience is becoming the new standard, and the infrastructure to make it possible is only now being built.
If this conversation resonates, you should be in the room in October.
The 2026 LP Technology Summit is a full day built around exactly this problem: how LPs are building the data infrastructure, operational systems and vendor relationships they need to keep pace with a GP landscape that’s moving faster than most diligence frameworks can track.
Tickets are $795 until August 10. $995 until September 5. $1,095 after.