Just six months after launching, fund management Caruso raised $3.2 million in a recent seed launch led by Icehouse Ventures.

Founders Mark Hurley and Oliver Shaw saw a gap in the market and decided to create Caruso, a software business that provides fund managers a platform where they can manage all their fund operations.

From everything from onboard investors, raise capital, manage compliance, issue distributions, tax statements, and everything else, Caruso is the platform to go to for fund managers.

Though they never set out to develop a SaaS business, the product they developed quickly became a solution to a real problem fund managers were facing.

“Caruso was originally just meant to streamline operations inside our own fund management business, but very quickly we had other fund managers enquiring about our software and how they might be able to license it for their own businesses,” says Hurley.

“By the end of 2022, that noise became too loud to ignore, so we did some research and found an unaddressed problem we were perfectly positioned to solve, in a very large and growing market.”

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At the time of writing, the company already has over $5 billion in Assets Under Management (AUM) and an additional $40 billion to come in the pipeline.

“We believe that the effort to maintain, understand and update investor data across multiple siloed systems is secretly the cause of almost all the administrative work of managing a fund. And the problem is industry-wide, across fund managers of all types and sizes,” adds Hurley.

“We’re helping fund managers break free from expensive, clunky, legacy systems and empowering them with modern tools to help them and their investors thrive.”

Six months since its launch, Caruso was able to raise $3.2 million with investment from venture capital firm GD1, Chris Heaslip, Founder of Pushpay, and the Rae Family of Gull Oil.

With the help of Icehouse Ventures, Caruso was able to secure this successful seed round.

Jack McQuire, Partner and Lead Investor at Icehouse Ventures says this platform will be truly impactful to the industry.

“We truly believe that the investment community will reflect on our history as BC and AC; before and after Caruso,” says McQuire. The capital Caruso earned will allow the platform to add sales and marketing capacity, increase the velocity of new feature releases and grow across the Tasman in hopes to open a Sydney office.