Private markets are the investment story of our time. No longer content to limit themselves to stock market-listed companies, investors worldwide are pumping money into assets such as private businesses, infrastructure and credit; S&P Global says private market assets under management worldwide will total more than than $18 trillion by 2027, up from less than $11 trillion in 2022.

However, there’s a problem. Asset managers and their service providers cannot keep up with the paperwork that this boom in demand is generating. In an industry still dependent on manual processes for everything from investor onboarding to performance monitoring, reporting and compliance, firms are drowning in documentation.

Johannes Gebendorfer, co-founder and CEO of Nomerra , a Berlin-based start-up that has built a new platform to help the sector transform, likens the current situation to the paperwork crisis that hit the New York Stock Exchange 50 or so years ago. In 1968, as trading volumes soared, Wall Street firms couldn’t stay on top of the workloads that resulted; the NYSE ended up closing on Wednesdays to help them catch up.

“There is just this huge gap in the back office of private markets,” says Gebendorfer. “The volumes are increasing so quickly and the talent available to deal with that workload is actually shrinking, because there are fewer accountants; regulatory scrutiny is also increasing. There is so much coming at this industry all at once.”

Nomerra, which is today announcing a $2 million funding round, believes its artificial intelligence-powered platform can help the industry to close this gap before it develops into a full-blown crisis.

The platform connects to the existing systems of asset managers and their service providers – including enterprise resource platforms (ERPs), banking platforms, email systems and document storage solutions – to extract the data required for processes in areas such as fund accounting, treasury and transfer agency. Nomerra’s AI agents then run these processes automatically, in line with the operating procedures of the firm, to automatically deliver the same outputs that staff are currently desperately trying to generate by hand.

“The goal is to shift people from preparing deliverables to reviewing them,” explains Gebendorfer. “Our agents handle the end-to-end execution and present the output in purpose-built review interfaces with a full audit trail so the firm can see what was done, why, and where the data came from.”

Both Johannes Gebendorfer and co-founder Jakob Zacherl can point to careers in the sector, including work for bunch, a German tech-enabled fund administrator that recently announced its Series B round and has secured capital of more than $50 million. Nomerra is at an earlier stage, but the founders believe their industry experience provides competitive advantage, particularly against larger tech sector rivals also eyeing the space.

Investors appear to agree. Today’s $2 million pre-seed round is one of the largest such raises in fintech this year. The round was led by 14Peaks Capital, with participation from Redstone Fintech and individual investors from firms including KKR and Intapp.

“This work demands trust, context and the ability to follow each firm’s own procedures,” says Edoardo Ermotti, founding general partner of 14Peaks Capital. “Generic AI tools can only go so far in an environment this complex; Nomerra was built from the ground up for the depth private markets require. Johannes and Jakob lived this problem before they set out to solve it, and that vertical focus is already proving to be a distribution edge.”

Indeed. Founded six months ago, Nomerra has already signed up around a dozen design partners across Europe and the US, which have installed the start-up’s platform in their businesses and are helping the firm to iterate its technology. All of those firms have more than $10 billion of assets under management Gebendorfer says, underlining the firm’s determination to work with large and complex private markets operators.