Illuminate Financial is proud to participate in Bunch's $35 million Series B, led by Portage Ventures, with continued participation from existing investors Motive Ventures, Cherry Ventures and FinTech Collective. Here's why we believe Bunch is on track to become the system of record for European private markets,  and why now is the right moment to back this team.

‍Trillions in AUM, still running on spreadsheets

The global alternatives market is projected to reach $30+ trillion in AUM by 2030. Yet the operational infrastructure that supports this asset class has barely changed in decades. Capital calls are still drafted manually, NAVs are reconciled across email threads and PDFs, and compliance filings move between disconnected service providers.

Operational complexity compounds with every new fund vintage, jurisdiction and LP added, yet the infrastructure layer underneath has not kept pace. This is what Bunch is rebuilding.

Why hasn't this been solved until now?

Three macro shifts have converged to make this the right moment:

• AI has driven the cost of structuring messy fund data toward zero: Subscription documents, LPAs, capital account statements and quarterly reports, long the province of human "middleware", are now extractable with high accuracy and reconcilable in real time.
• LPs are demanding transparency and faster reporting: Modern infrastructure has shifted from a back-office afterthought to a fundraising differentiator.
• European regulatory complexity has deepened, not lifted: AIFMD, FATCA/CRS, jurisdiction-specific tax regimes and the BaFin/FCA/CSSF/AFM patchwork are too costly for a US-first platform to retrofit, and have proven a multi-year barrier even for well-funded entrants.

Yet incumbents are structurally constrained from solving this. Traditional fund administrators bill by the hour, which puts them in direct conflict with deploying their own automation. Point-solution software vendors solve a single workflow but leave the reconciliation burden on the manager. The window for a European-native, vertically integrated platform has opened, and Bunch has stepped into it.

The Bunch advantage: a unified operating system, not another point tool

Bunch is rebuilding the fund operations stack from the ledger up. Rather than layering software onto a legacy services model, it has architected a single system of record from inception, combining software with embedded services across the full fund lifecycle.

Three things stand out:

• A single system of record across the fund lifecycle: LP onboarding, transfer agency, fund accounting, treasury, tax and compliance all run on one structured ledger. Closed-loop workflows replace email and PDF, with role-based access, full audit trails and audit-ready reporting from day one.
• AI-accelerated automation built on structured data: AI extraction pulls clean transaction data from subscription documents, capital account statements and incoming reports, then maps it into a deterministic structured ledger. The result is a software-led model that compounds: every customer onboarded enriches the dataset, and every workflow automated improves margins permanently — a direct architectural advantage over services-led incumbents whose hourly-billing model is fundamentally misaligned with automation.

Embedded compliance and regulatory infrastructure: Multi-jurisdictional regulatory requirements including KYC/AML, tax reporting, and statutory filings across Germany, Netherlands and UK are productised, not outsourced, turning Europe's regulatory complexity into a competitive moat. Native-built compliance enables real-time monitoring and automated reporting across jurisdictions without third-party friction. The recent launch of bunch tax exemplifies this strategy, bringing fragmented external tax and accounting dependencies fully inside the platform as a single source of regulatory truth.

Together, these collapse five to seven external providers into a single accountable platform.

A team executing across Europe

We've known Levent, Enrico and the Bunch team for several years, and have been continually impressed by the pace and discipline with which they'veexecuted. Bunch started in Berlin in 2021, serving emerging European VC managers, a clear and underserved wedge. From that foothold, the team has built out a pan-European operation in just over three years: UK operations launched in late 2024, a regulated Luxembourg base followed in early 2025, and bunch tax went live at the end of last year, bringing integrated tax and accounting fully inside the platform.Co-founders Levent Altunel (ex-Citi, Roland Berger, SquareOne) and Enrico Ohnemüller (ex-Finleap, where he helped set up Motive Ventures) bring a complementary blend of fund-operations depth and execution velocity. Around them, the senior bench has been deliberately upgraded for the move upmarket:

• Diana Dinis (CPO): Previously led product at Mollie, Mambu, Remote and Paymentsense.
• Leandro Storoli (VP Engineering): Senior Director of Engineering at Wolt, prior tech leadership at Nubank.
• Tim Ferguson (VP Commercial): Over a decade leading EMEA private markets software sales at Allvue and BlackMountain Systems.

Today, the platform is trusted by 150+ asset managers, 12,000+ investors across 500+ investment structures.

Our thesis: from fund administration to fund intelligence

Bunch isn't just modernising fund administration: it is building the structured data layer for European private capital. Every fund onboarded deepens a proprietary dataset that incumbents cannot replicate and new entrants cannot bootstrap. Over time, this layer becomes the foundation for analytics, benchmarking and the next generation of LP and GP intelligence products.

We have backed Bunch because we believe the winners in private markets infrastructure will be vertically integrated, software-first, and built natively for European regulatory reality. Bunch is exactly that.

We're proud to partner with Levent, Enrico and the entire Bunch team as they build the operating system for the next generation of private capital.

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