Why we exist

We founded Standard Metrics in 2020 based on a simple but important observation from building and investing in startups: investor relations are broken in the private markets.

Today, trillions of dollars of economic activity in the private markets still run on spreadsheets, email threads, and PDFs. This critical ecosystem remains surprisingly analog and inefficient despite financing many of the world’s most innovative companies.

Portfolio updates live in inboxes. KPIs are tracked in scattered spreadsheets. There is no single, reliable source of truth for how a firm’s portfolio is actually performing, creating headaches for CFOs, investors, and auditors. Manual, cumbersome reporting and analytics workflows remain the norm, leading to pain and inefficiency for companies and investors alike. Collaboration between portfolio companies and their investors is reactive instead of proactive. LPs lack consistent, accurate reporting from their underlying fund investments. Investment decisions lean on gut feel and neglect data.

This problem matters. A better-functioning innovation economy would lead to big new technological breakthroughs, life-saving medicines, jobs, and game-changing new products.

Our mission at Standard Metrics is to accelerate innovation in the private markets.

AI is transforming the private markets and our business

At inception, we decided to focus on an area that has resisted digitization for decades in the private markets: portfolio reporting and management. Over the past six years, we’ve scaled a next-generation portfolio management platform and reporting network that largely replaces spreadsheet-based processes (and sometimes legacy incumbent software). We help investors to gain deeper insight into their portfolio and automate mission-critical processes across their back-office and investment teams. We also create a more streamlined and insightful reporting process for portfolio companies. As our network grows and becomes denser, we are able to generate more time savings for our users and deliver better benchmarks and performance insights.

During this period of growth, AI has radically upgraded the tools we have at our disposal. AI expands both the urgency and the scope of this opportunity. New AI models have fundamentally changed how data can be ingested, organized, analyzed, and acted upon, and they are beginning to drive rapid software adoption in an industry that has historically lagged behind. We believe AI-native infrastructure will reshape the private markets over the coming decade.

Two years ago, we bet our company on the idea of building the AI-native portfolio management platform for venture capital and private equity. This was the single most consequential decision in our history and pushed the capabilities of our product to the frontier. It led us to create the first MCP server in our space, launch an AI-driven document processing service, and build cutting-edge agentic reporting and analytics tools. One of our customers cut its quarterly reporting process from fifteen days to two days by connecting Standard Metrics data to its AI workflows.

We’re proud of the results we’ve achieved. We now support more than 150 investment firms that collectively manage over $400B, along with more than 10,000 of their portfolio companies. 30% of the Forbes Midas List are customers of Standard Metrics, the clearest signal we could ask for that many of the best investors in the world are choosing to run portfolio management on Standard Metrics.

Going further, faster

Today, we’re pleased to share that Standard Metrics has raised a $20M Series B led by 8VC. Other investors in this round include Salesforce Ventures, Spark Capital, January Capital, First Trust Capital Partners, Socii Capital, Kindergarten Ventures, Calm Ventures, Gaingels, and more. We’ve raised roughly $50M to date, and most of that capital has come from our customers.

We’ve grown our business by approximately 20X since our Series A. This is the result of firms deciding, one by one, that the old way of doing portfolio management (the emails, the spreadsheets, the manual reconciliation) wasn’t good enough anymore. We’re grateful for every customer that has bet on us and joined us in this movement.

This Series B round is a vote of confidence from investors who believe, as we do, that the firms who embrace AI now will be the ones defining the next era of the private markets. We’re going to use this capital to go further, faster: expanding our platform so firms can centralize more mission-critical data in one place, honing our AI document processing engine so firms can maintain accurate data easily, deepening our AI Analyst and MCP capabilities to further democratize agentic reporting and analysis, offering deeper performance insights to portfolio companies and investors, and much more. If you want to join us on this mission, we’re hiring.

Thank you to our customers, our team, and our investors for building with us. We’re just getting started, and there are many interesting problems we plan to tackle to support the innovation economy. We hope you will join us in solving them.