When Chris Hladczuk left Goldman Sachs' leveraged finance desk to build software for private fund managers, he was chasing a problem most people outside finance have never heard of: fund administration. It's the behind-the-scenes accounting that keeps venture capital and private equity firms running—tracking investments, processing capital calls, reconciling portfolios with endless spreadsheets and manual checks.
Unglamorous? Absolutely. But Hladczuk saw an opening.
Last September, his New York-based startup Hanover Park closed a $27 million Series A round led by Emergence Capital, betting that artificial intelligence could upend a market long dominated by legacy players like SS&C Technologies and Apex Group. The pitch is straightforward, if ambitious: replace weeks of manual accounting work with AI agents that do the grunt work while human experts review the output. By January of this year, the company's Forbes profile had been updated to reflect the raise—a signal that Hanover Park was emerging from stealth mode with real traction.
The numbers, at least on the surface, suggest momentum. Founded in 2024, Hanover Park says it has scaled to roughly $15 billion in assets under administration. That's a remarkable clip for a company that reached $1 billion in AUA during 2025. A LinkedIn post from Hladczuk noted the firm had crossed $10 billion by the end of 2025, meaning the bulk of that growth unfolded over the course of the year.
Speed as a Selling Point
In an industry where quarterly financial closes can drag on for weeks—sometimes two months—speed matters. Customer testimonials from firms using Hanover Park lean heavily on this point. Steel Atlas, a New York venture firm, reported cutting its quarterly close from roughly 60 days down to three. That's a 20-times improvement, the kind of efficiency gain that turns heads in back offices.
Susa Ventures, which manages north of $1 billion, switched to the platform for what it described as same-day capital call execution. The subtext here is clear: fund managers are tired of waiting. They want real-time data, not month-end reports that arrive weeks late.
The product itself bundles traditional fund administration—general ledger maintenance, portfolio tracking, compliance reporting—with newer AI-driven features. Automated KPI collection, LP portals, AI-powered reconciliation. It's part accounting firm, part software platform, an attempt to thread the needle between service and technology.
Hanover Park has moved quickly to plug into the broader fintech ecosystem. In January, the company announced a partnership with Ramp to sync expense data directly into its ledger. Later that month, it rolled out automated payment functionality with no transaction fees on its end. Then came a Brex integration in February, promoted on LinkedIn, that auto-completes general ledger coding for corporate card transactions.
These aren't revolutionary features on their own. But for fund managers juggling multiple tools—one for expenses, another for banking, a third for administration—the appeal is consolidation. One platform, fewer reconciliation headaches.
Betting on Private Markets Growth
Hanover Park's timing aligns with broader industry tailwinds. Private equity assets under management were projected to roughly double from $5.8 trillion at the end of 2023 to around $12 trillion by 2029, according to a 2025 report from Preqin. A more recent McKinsey analysis noted that operational complexity in private markets keeps expanding, driven by customized LP demands and increasingly fragmented portfolios. That environment favors platforms that can automate the chaos.
Still, the fund administration market is anything but wide open. Incumbent providers have decades of relationships, regulatory expertise, and—perhaps most importantly—trust. Convincing a CFO to hand over fund accounting to a two-year-old startup with AI under the hood is a tough sell, no matter how impressive the demo. Hanover Park holds SOC 1 Type II and SOC 2 Type II certifications, standard credentials for handling sensitive financial data. The platform runs on AWS infrastructure with AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit, monitored through Drata. Those are table stakes in this business, not differentiators.
The company's headcount grew from four employees to 22 during 2025, according to Hladczuk. Current LinkedIn data suggests the team now falls somewhere between 11 and 50 people—a wide range that reflects either rapid hiring or the imprecision of social media profiles. The office sits on East 23rd Street in Manhattan, squarely in the heart of New York's fintech corridor.
What Comes Next
Hanover Park has been teasing a "Model Context Protocol server" feature in recent LinkedIn posts, a technical flourish that would let CFOs and investment teams query their fund data directly through ChatGPT, Claude, or Google's Gemini. It's the kind of move that signals ambition—turning a fund administration platform into something closer to a conversational AI interface for financial operations.
Whether that vision resonates with fund managers remains to be seen. The company continues to hire for both technical and accounting roles, with job postings as of February citing more than $10 billion in assets under administration. That figure, assuming it's current, would put Hanover Park well into the territory of a credible challenger, even if it's still dwarfed by the incumbents.
Hladczuk, who worked in leveraged finance at Goldman before a stint as chief revenue officer at a company called Meow, landed on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list for finance in 2026. His co-founder and CTO, Nick Puljic, previously co-founded Stock Unlock, which went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, and spent time as a software engineer at Oscar Health. It's the kind of resume pairing—finance meets engineering—that investors in enterprise SaaS tend to like.
For now, Hanover Park is racing to prove that AI can handle the thankless, detail-obsessed work of fund administration. If they're right, they've spotted a multi-billion-dollar opportunity hiding in plain sight. If not, well—there's a reason the legacy players have held onto this market for so long.
