Aqua, a New York-based startup building software infrastructure for alternative investments, said Tuesday it closed a $15 million Series A financing led by Arthur Ventures. The round, which included participation from Alumni Ventures, brings the company's total raised to $18.8 million since its founding in 2021.
The funding arrives alongside the launch of what Aqua calls its Turnkey Alternative Investment Platform, a suite of tools designed to replace the spreadsheets and patchwork systems that still dominate how wealth managers handle private equity, hedge funds, and other illiquid assets. As client appetite for alternatives has accelerated in recent years, the operational machinery behind the scenes has struggled to keep pace.
Aqua's pitch is straightforward: modular infrastructure that covers the full lifecycle of alternative investing. The platform includes a portfolio command center for enterprise clients, mechanisms to launch access vehicles such as feeder funds and special-purpose vehicles, a factory for interval and tender-offer funds, a marketplace for discovery and transactions, and document-intelligence software powered by AI.
The company now supports around 8,000 financial advisers and investment professionals who collectively serve roughly 170,000 wealth-management clients, according to This Week in Fintech. Named customers on the advisory side include DAI Securities, Arkadios Capital, Concord Investment Solutions, and Independent Financial Group. On the asset-management side, Aqua works with three of the five largest private fund managers—names the company declined to disclose—as well as U.S. Energy Development Corp., Cantor Fitzgerald, T. Rowe Price, Inland Real Estate, and Hamilton Point Investments.
CEO Rohan Marwaha, who previously worked at Blackstone, co-founded the company with Dev Patel, a former Bank of America technologist who specialized in capital markets software. The two met at Y Combinator's Summer 2021 cohort, which brought together 377 companies from 47 countries. They initially pursued a direct-to-consumer marketplace model before pivoting. "The need for streamlined alts was greater in the advisory space," Marwaha told This Week in Fintech.
The company initially raised a $2.5 million seed announced in November 2021, which was later extended to a total of $3.8 million, led by Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused investment arm, with Y Combinator participating. Aqua's 23-person team has embedded AI capabilities from the beginning. "We were some of the earliest in the space to believe that where AI has a lot of value is in repetitive manual tasks," Marwaha said.
The market Aqua is entering has grown crowded in recent years. iCapital, the category leader, reports $327 billion in platform assets as of August 2026 and recently forged a partnership with BlackRock's Aladdin Wealth technology. CAIS, another established player, publishes an annual alternatives survey with consulting firm Mercer. Newer entrants include Opto Investments, which offers registered investment advisers infrastructure to launch feeders and bespoke funds, and GLASfunds, backed by CI Financial.
The opportunity appears substantial. Interval and tender-offer funds alone have expanded to 308 products managing $275 billion as of late last year, according to XA Investments. A CAIS-Mercer survey of 789 financial advisers found that 80 percent of those serving non-accredited clients already allocate to alternatives, with technology cited as a critical enabler.
Still, the operational gap remains wide. "Demand for alternatives has grown fast, but most firms are still trying to meet client needs with spreadsheets, fragmented processes and manual solutions," Marwaha said in the announcement. David Coyle, Aqua's head of growth, added a pointed distinction: "Many firms still think a marketplace is the same thing as an alternatives strategy. It isn't."
Aqua plans to deploy the fresh capital toward expanding platform capabilities and broadening asset-type coverage. "Regardless of what asset type within alts you want to transact in, we can support all of it," Marwaha said. Whether that ambition translates into market share against entrenched competitors will depend on execution—and on how quickly wealth managers are willing to abandon their spreadsheets.
