Alfia Ilicheva came from the world of public markets, including four years at one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Bridgewater. But when she transitioned over to the private side, including serving as the CEO of an Apollo-backed investment platform, she realized the difficulty of fund administration for operations like private equity and venture capital. Instead of having access to real-time and accurate data like at Bridgewater, which can rely on publicly available information, this new world was filled with manually compiled and fragmented data subject to human error and inconsistent metrics. “How could it be that hedge funds are so into the future and private capital markets are so backward,” she remembers thinking.
As private markets explode and AI makes automation increasingly possible, Ilicheva saw an opportunity to build the next generation of fund administration software for everyone from venture capital outfits to PE giants like Apollo. After initially planning to bootstrap the project, which she named Formulary, Ilicheva was introduced to Hari Arul, a partner at Khosla Ventures, who immediately saw the appeal of the idea. Khosla is leading Formulary’s $4.6 million seed round, which Ilicheva says is three times oversubscribed, with participation from Human Ventures, Serena Williams’s venture firm, and others.
