I Raised $150M With No Banker. What It Taught Me About Private Credit

Forbes

3 days ago

Inefficient offline workflows destroying value for private market investors
Good times are rolling in private credit. But try raising $150 million without a banker and you'll see just how broken the process still is.
That was me. No advisor. No placement agent. Just a thesis, a spreadsheet trail, and a team crazy enough to take it on. What started as a founder-led fundraise turned into a case study in inefficiency. Weekslong gaps. Duplicate diligence requests. Disconnected timelines. It wasn't just painful—it was telling.
Despite clean data and operator experience, the system buckled under its own weight. What should've been a streamlined capital deployment became a fragmented slog.
And it drove one thing home:
The private markets aren't short on capital. They're short on infrastructure.The Process Is Broken
Private credit isn't slowing down. Global AUM crossed $1.7 trillion in 2024 and is on pace to hit $2.8 trillion by 2028, according to Preqin. It's grown into a cornerstone of capital formation—across software, infrastructure, services, and beyond.
But the tech stack hasn't kept up.
Before founding Arc, I was on the other side—sitting on deal teams at a multi-billion dollar PE fund. Whether the check size was $50 million or $2 billion, it was always the same: three people, same templates, same war room drama. It worked—until it didn't.
When I became a borrower, the inefficiencies were even more stark. Everything was offline, redundant, and painfully manual. I'd send over polished data rooms and still get follow-up requests asking for the same numbers in a different format. We'd tick and tie the same metrics across half a dozen spreadsheets—then walk through it all again on a diligence call. The back and forth was endless. And none of it made the underwriting smarter. It just made it slower.
That's not just annoying. It's a fundamental constraint.Enter the AI-Native Deal Team
This model is finally starting to crack.
We're seeing the rise of AI-native deal teams—leaner, faster, and infinitely more scalable. No headcount arms race. No marathon in data rooms. Just AI-powered execution. And in an increasingly competitive private credit market, speed and efficiency has never been more important.
At Arc, we built infrastructure designed for this reality. Our system reads Excel models, calculates leverage, maps covenants, and flags inconsistencies—with ~3x the precision of general-purpose LLMs. No hallucinations. No skipped steps. Just auditable, compounding intelligence.
It's the system I wish I had when I was in the bullpen—and what I desperately needed when raising.
And now, a $10M deal and a $500M deal run on the same rails. Analysts focus on insights. Lenders get signal, not noise. Capital moves faster. Everyone wins.The Analyst, Reimagined
This isn't just a workflow upgrade. It's a role redefinition.
In the AI-native stack, analysts aren't note-takers. They're systems operators. The best ones today aren't necessarily ex-Ivy bankers. They're people who know how to translate messy data into clean judgment.
Less clipboard. More command center.
We've seen one great analyst, equipped with the right tools, outperform an entire deal team. They're not just working faster—they're delivering alpha. They're upstream of the decision.What Smart Firms Are Doing Now
The most forward-thinking funds aren't talking about this. They're already doing it.
Diligence cycles compressed from three weeks to three days. Post-close monitoring that flags borrower stress before it hits the financials. Less time spent spreading financials. More time spent structuring deals.
And they're not overengineering it. They're deploying infrastructure that works. They're treating analysts like multipliers, not expense lines. They see data as a compounding asset, not a static file.The Infrastructure Era
My fundraise wasn't fun. But it was revealing. The friction wasn't a fluke. It was systemic.
Private markets are sitting on trillions in dry powder—but they're bottlenecked by brittle workflows, disconnected systems, and diligence cycles stuck in 2012.
The winners of this next chapter won't be defined by AUM. They'll be defined by how quickly and intelligently they move capital.
This is the infrastructure era—and it's just getting started.
At Arc, we're not just watching the shift happen. We're building the rails.
We built Arc Capital Markets to address both sides of this problem: it's now the largest B2B debt marketplace for middle-market companies, giving borrowers a faster, more transparent way to access capital. And on the other side, we developed agentic AI systems to help private credit funds and banks underwrite with precision—so they can scale volume without sacrificing quality.
It's the future of private markets—and it's already in motion.