JPMorgan aims to be the one-stop-shop for VCs and startup founders with Aumni acquisition

JPMorgan Chase has made yet another fintech acquisition under CEO Jamie Dimon’s leadership.

The bank has acquired Aumni, a data analytics provider for startup investors, as part of a broader initiative to strengthen its relationships with venture capital investors and their companies.

The acquisition will help JPMorgan deepen its capabilities in areas such as payments and ESG investing.

What is Aumni?

Founded in 2018 by Tony Lewis, a former corporate lawyer, Aumni is a Utah-based data platform that helps users analyze and understand their holdings via a simple dashboard. The company has data on nearly 18,000 portfolio companies valued at $3.6 trillion, according to Lewis. It charges an annual subscription fee based on assets under management and the number of companies tracked.

The deal, which was valued at approximately $232 million, was made after JPMorgan led Aumni’s 2021 investment round, according to Michael Elanjian, who leads JPMorgan’s digital private markets efforts. The acquisition will help JPMorgan disrupt the industry standard, Microsoft Excel, that most VC firms use to track investments in portfolio companies.

Aumni addresses the challenge of gleaning insights into holdings from contracts underpinning a single equity round that can exceed 600 pages of dense legal writing. According to Lewis, this is a problem for anyone investing in any private alternative asset, since the economics and legal rights of such investments reside in private contracts.

Why the Banks Needs this Kind of Investment?

Investors in recent weeks leaned on Aumni after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank sent shock waves through the startup community, according to Lewis. The sudden worries over uninsured deposits at midsized banks made VCs curious about where their portfolio companies banked and whether they had legal rights to inspect their financial books.

The service will be integrated with JPMorgan’s private markets platform, Capital Connect, which came out of stealth mode last year, Elanjian said. The acquisition complements the bank’s acquisition of Global Shares, a software provider for managing employee stock plans.

The broader goal is to become the digital destination for VCs, startup founders, and other investors to raise money, network, and tap loans, Elanjian said. Capital Connect now has about 850 clients and 200 employees.

JPMorgan has been making a half-dozen fintech acquisitions since 2020 to strengthen its capabilities in areas such as payments and ESG investing. The bank’s technology investments have recently come under scrutiny amid rising expenses and an acrimonious legal dispute over a 2021 acquisition.

JPMorgan’s acquisition of Aumni is yet another step toward creating an end-to-end ecosystem for the venture community and the private markets. The move is expected to bolster the bank’s position in the fintech landscape and increase its competitive advantage in the years to come.