Canoe Intelligence announced the completion of an oversubscribed extension of its Series A financing led by Blackstone Innovations Investments and Carlyle, with participation from existing investor Hamilton Lane. Financial details are not disclosed. Canoe is a financial technology company that automates data management processes for alternative investors, wealth managers, asset servicers, and capital allocators.
Since becoming clients of Canoe, both Blackstone and Carlyle have experienced significant efficiencies in automating their investment workflows, particularly related to document collection, data extraction and normalization, and data delivery into internal and external reporting systems. As a result of their experience so far, both firms decided to lead Canoe’s latest funding round and further support Canoe’s strategic direction and the industry adoption of automated technology.
Canoe completed its initial Series A funding round in February 2020 which included investments from multiple participants, many of whom are also strategic partners and advisors, including Hamilton Lane, Nasdaq Ventures, and other alternative investment leaders.
With this additional funding, Canoe plans to continue accelerating the product development of its platform that brings greater ease and efficiency to the management of data used for alternative investment analysis, accounting, and reporting. The company also plans to expand its product suite to include new tools, functionality and reporting capabilities, and continue to make alternative investment data available to clients in ways that further drive value and bottom-line impact. Finally, Canoe expects to further expand its presence geographically, and grow its leadership team with product, development, machine learning and data science talent.
Since Canoe’s commercial launch in 2018, the company has established relationships with some of the world’s most sophisticated asset managers, service providers, family offices, and allocators, most recently including State Street. Canoe’s technology has enabled these companies to maximize the value of their data and focus more on investment decision-making, client service and other value-add functions.
“Since becoming Canoe clients, our team immediately experienced new efficiencies in our post-investment workflows from reducing latency in reporting, to populating our internal systems and investment book of record with the most relevant data,” said John Fitzpatrick, managing director and chief technology officer of Alternative Asset Management Technology at Blackstone, in a statement.
Carlyle is implementing this technology at AlpInvest, a private equity asset manager within Carlyle’s Investment Solutions segment.
“Carlyle has been investing in emerging technology providers that increase efficiency and allow us to harness our significant information advantage. Our partnership with Canoe is an important part of this effort, as it automates back office documentation processes and data extraction, reducing manual tasks and allowing our team to focus on higher value-add work,” said Eric Hanno, partner and co-head of AlpInvest’s Primary Investment Team at Carlyle, in a statement.