Curated by Rob Saunders, WhoFiled.
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The big theme: The institutional AI plumbing for finance has a default vendor, and Anthropic locked it in over two days.
On May 4, Anthropic, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman announced a $1.5 billion joint venture, with Apollo and General Atlantic participating, to deploy engineers and Claude AI directly inside companies owned by the participating sponsors. The next day, May 5, at an invite-only Wall Street briefing attended by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.7, its most capable model for financial work, alongside a pre-built suite of AI agents for the world’s largest banks, full Microsoft 365 integration, and a Moody’s data partnership. Marc Nachmann, Goldman’s global head of asset and wealth management, framed the JV’s logic plainly: “Having the model alone doesn’t change your workflows or how you operate.” The implementation layer is the bottleneck, not the model.
Goldman alone oversees approximately $3.5 trillion in assets under supervision; Blackstone manages another $1.3 trillion as the world’s largest alternative asset manager. The participating sponsors are not running a thesis check on AI. They are funding the implementation layer for it. Leading names in private equity, investment banking, and alternatives distribution (iCapital) all picked the same model in the same week.
Notable investment tech raises
Templum raised $13.5 million in a Series A, per a Form D filing. The New York-based company is the infrastructure layer for private markets, providing white-label and API-deployable broker-dealer support, marketplace technology, and full investment lifecycle workflow tooling. Customers include SoFi, Wedbush’s Alpha One Global Family Office, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Voya Investment Management, and Pomona Capital. In March, Templum and SoFi opened a 25-day window letting accredited SoFi members allocate to Perplexity AI, OpenAI, and Colossal Biosciences. Last week we named the retail private markets access wave as a pattern to watch.
Performativ raised $14 million in a Series A led by Deutsche Börse Group, with Rabo Investments (Rabobank), former McKinsey global banking sector co-leader Jacob Dahl, and existing investors FinTech Collective and EIFO (Denmark’s sovereign wealth fund) participating. The Copenhagen-based company runs a cloud-native operating system that consolidates portfolio management, attribution, risk, compliance, multi-custodian data aggregation, and trading into one platform with embedded AI agents.
Marloo raised $10 million in a seed round led by Blackbird Ventures, with Icehouse Ventures participating. The London-based company builds an AI partner for financial advisers that handles meeting notes, advice documents, compliance workflows, and a persistent client knowledge base, pushing past the AI-notetaker category toward an operating system for advisory firms. 650 paying advisory firms across six countries in under a year, 40% month-over-month revenue growth, near-zero churn. Blackbird now holds approximately 34% after leading both rounds.
On the radar
Caruso closed a $6.5 million Series A at a $55 million valuation led by Icehouse Ventures and GD1 for its AI-native fund administration platform for private markets, with private credit fund Balmain re-upping. Assets under administration jumped 10x to $55 billion in 12 months, with revenue up 400%. Same pitch as K1x’s $175 million two weeks ago: fund admin still runs on spreadsheets and email, and the firms automating it are scaling fast.
Safebooks AI launched a set of agents that automate reconciliation, validation, policy enforcement, workpapers, and close workflows. The buyer is corporate finance rather than the GP, but the architecture is identical to what Rogo runs at the top of the market and what Patlytics runs in legal diligence. When the same architecture surfaces in fund admin, corporate close, portfolio monitoring, and patent diligence within four weeks, it is a category signal, not a coincidence.
The takeaway for investors
Two weeks ago we named the through-line uniting the largest investment-tech raises: specialized AI agents executing professional-grade work autonomously, with humans reviewing outputs. This week is further validation.
Data sourced from SEC Form D filings, developer activity, and alternative signal tracking by Rob Saunders at WhoFiled. Reporting on Anthropic’s May 4 joint venture and May 5 banking briefing draws on coverage from CNBC and Fortune.