Private
deals, together.

A founder calls. Or the call is from a friend at another family office, who has just been pulled into a round and wants you in with them. The deal is interesting. The terms are not yet final. There is, perhaps, a window of three weeks.

You want in, but not at the size you could write alone. Sometimes that is because the cheque you'd want to write is bigger than your single-deal allocation. More often it is because the deal is better with the right people in it. A specific operator who knows the sector. A family with a relationship that helps the company in its next market. Two or three peers whose combined size lets you negotiate proper terms — a board seat, an information right, an anti-dilution clause — that you would not get alone.

This is how a great deal becomes a great syndicate. Not by raising capital, but by composing the investor list. The lead family's job is to pick the people, set the terms, and keep the relationship with the company. Everything else, in principle, should be infrastructure.

For years, what we did not have was a way to do this without it costing more than it was worth.

Each new deal meant a new vehicle. Lawyers in Luxembourg or Cayman. Subscription documents drafted from scratch. KYC packs collected one investor at a time. Custody arrangements that worked for one family's bank but not another's. By the time the structure existed, the deal had often closed; we had bridged it from our own balance sheet and were doing administrative cleanup rather than investing.

And once the deal was in, we became the back office for everyone we had brought in. Subscription tracking. Distribution notices. Tax packs. Quarterly updates assembled from the underlying GP's reporting. Side letters tracked across years. None of this was the work we wanted to be doing. None of it was the work the co-investors expected from us, either; they wanted exposure, not a relationship with our administrator.

So we built a template.

We chose Guernsey for the issuer — a Protected Cell Company, with one legally segregated cell per deal, recognised by Swiss and European private banks. No commingling across deals. No general fund. A failure in one deal does not touch another. We chose to issue bankable certificates with their own ISIN, cleared through SIX, settling T+2 into whatever brokerage the investor already used. We chose to manage the strategy through a FINMA-supervised Swiss asset manager. And we chose a fee architecture aligned with the work: one percent annual on all capital, to operate the infrastructure. Ten percent of the upside, but only on the capital we bring — none on the lead family's own. Every deal is anchored in cash by the lead family at first close. No pledged anchors.

We then used it. More than ten times. Across credit secondaries, late-stage growth, and real assets. We syndicated over CHF 100 million from family office co-investors through this template, and the template did not break. The 2022 round we led for a US biotech became the documented version of the work, written up by Professor Florin Vasvari at London Business School as a teaching case for the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital. Our role, the architecture, the certificates, the fee structure — all of it on the public record.

The architecture works because it removes the part of the syndicate the co-investor never wanted in the first place. The investor's existing private bank has already onboarded them, and the bankable certificate inherits that. The instrument is custodied at UBS, Pictet, Julius Baer, Lombard Odier, Vontobel, or wherever the investor already banks.

What was always missing was the operational layer. The wrapper was repeatable. The work around it was not.

For ten years, the work around each deal was done by hand — by us, mostly, occasionally with help, never at the speed the deals deserved. Drafting the deal room. Composing the distribution list. Writing the outreach in the lead family's voice. Tracking who opened what. Reconciling the subscriptions as they came in. Producing the reports. Most of it was rote, all of it was necessary, and none of it added a single basis point of return.

Over the last twelve months, we automated it. Not in the SaaS sense — there is no dashboard the lead family is asked to manage. The automation runs on its own, reports daily, and asks for approval where approval matters. The lead family approves the deal at setup, approves the distribution list, approves the messaging. Every outbound message is approved by the lead family before it leaves the platform. After that, the platform executes. Materials go out. Recipients are tracked. Subscriptions reconcile as the certificates settle. Tax packs assemble at year end. The lead family receives, every day, a single status memo per active deal — where it stands, what closes when, what the platform will do next. It arrives on WhatsApp, where the lead family already reads.

The output is documents, not dashboards. A controlled deal room that recipients open like a private dossier. A status memo the lead family reads in the morning the way a private banker would read a daily brief. None of these feel like software. All of them are.

And on the co-investor's side, the experience is still the simplest part of all. They submit a subscription request on the platform — name, amount, bank, four taps. The lead family approves it. Their banker is then instructed to settle the certificate against their custody account. That is the entire transaction. No subscription documents. No fresh KYC or AML. No new custodian. The certificate settles into their existing account two days later, exactly the way a bond would. It appears in the wealth statement that already sits on their desk.