Built to simplify complexity

Addepar is a wealth management software for financial advisors and institutions to aggregate, analyze, and report on complex investment portfolios. Its cloud-based investment management platform provides wealth managers with a unified and granular view of their clients’ entire balance sheets.

Addepar, stemming from the Latin “add a little to a little and you will have a great amount”, was founded in 2009 by Joe Lonsdale, 8VC GP and a co-founder of Palantir, and by Peter Thiel.

Eric Poirier, who previously served as a director at Palantir, joined Addepar as CEO in 2013 and continues to lead the company. He describes the company’s mission:

“Our founding thesis has proven to be true: investment professionals and financial advisors need powerful technology, complete and accurate data, purpose-built tools and a contextual perspective in order to succeed in delivering value to clients in a high-quality, sustainable way — and by building a unified platform that’s used to serve clients in a meaningfully better way, we would be in a unique position to unlock value to clients across the global financial world. With this bold and ambitious vision, we’ve believed from the start that we can create one of the most important financial technology companies of the 21st century – and we’re well on the path to doing that”.

Addepar ingests positions and transactions every day from more than 7M accounts across 350+ global financial institutions and tracks 250K+ unique positions in alternative investments. Its clients collectively manage nearly $7T in assets on the platform, a figure growing by $1T annually since 2020. For comparison, the total wealth management  AuM in Brazil are ~$1T. Reflecting its global expansion, Itaú Private recently announced a partnership with Addepar in Brazil.

Addepar consistently invests $100M annually in technology, with 50% of its 1,000-person team dedicated to tech development. According to Poirier: “Addepar has invested heavily for 14 years to build this technology, data and product foundation. Today, we are privileged to be in the position of having the market-leading platform — at a time when wealth, investment and asset management firms globally are recognizing that this solution is now a requirement”.

Addepar has raised $560M in total funding, achieving over 70% gross margins with no debt and no current need for additional funding. Its last valuation in June 2021 was $2.2B.

Conclusion

Addepar follows a pattern similar to Palantir: technology as a key differentiator, natural network effect, consistent gain of scale to achieve perennial leadership.

 We are betting on this.