Tetrix Closes $5 Million Seed Round in Bid to Ease Investment in Private Markets

Olivier Babin

New York-based Tetrix, which is developed AI-based technology to make it easier to invest in private markets, has raised $5 million in a seed round led by former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Other investors include angel investors from BlackRock, SoftBank, Lending Club, Plaid and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Stanford Business School classmates Olivier Babin, a former Softbank executive, and Naunidh Singh Bhalla, an engineer who previously worked for JPMorgan, co-founded Tetrix. The Canadian-born Babin has work experience in Kenya and Nigeria. Bhalla earned an engineering degree from the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Data Access Is Key

The duo — voted by their fellow students as the most likely to build a unicorn — saw a business opportunity in the wide gulf between investor enthusiasm for private markets and the difficulty of accessing data on private companies, often hidden in thousands of PDFs and other documents.

“Our mission is simple: drive better investment decision-making with better data,” said Babin, the Canadian-born Babin who serves as Tetrix’s CEO. “Tetrix leverages the latest developments in AI to reduce time to actionable investment data from 45 days to 1 day.” According to Babin, Tetrix’s technology could save capital allocators 4,000+ hours annually in human labor, while providing them “10x deeper insights on their alternative investment portfolio.”

Tetrix’s founders say they engaged with over 250 market participants to understand the difficulties in accessing data on private markets before using that knowledge to build AI-based technology, which can scan through mountains of unstructured data from email, PDFs, Excel sheets and other documents. Tetrix’s platform zeroes in on vital financials contained in these documents and brings insights demanded by investors.

In Quest of Alpha

Over the past decade, Babin says, the investment landscape has shifted from public markets to private markets, which have quadrupled in assets.

“Capital allocators view the private and alternative market as where they generate most of their alpha, so even if it’s 40%-50% of their portfolio, they’re spending a disproportionate amount of time thinking about those investment-making decisions,” Babin told Axios.

“The Tetrix platform promises not only to improve investment decisions but also to revolutionize them with real-time insights and risk management tools,” said Harpinder Singh, a partner at Innovation Endeavors. “Data insights are the single most important asset to businesses today, and what Tetrix provides is sure to give capital allocators a competitive advantage in their investment strategies.”