Private markets have grown rapidly, but much of the infrastructure supporting them still relies on PDFs, spreadsheets, emails, and data rooms. In a recent episode of the Modern Capital podcast, Daphne CEO Amit Gairola joined Hamilton Lane’s Griff Norville to discuss what needs to change as the industry enters its next phase of growth. 

The conversation begins with a simple idea: private markets need to think more seriously about the experience they provide investors. Drawing on his decade at Amazon, Amit argues that customer experience is about much more than interface design. It depends on speed, reliability, availability, and trust. For private-market investors, delayed or inconsistent data, multiple portals, and manual reconciliation remain significant sources of friction. 

Griff builds on that point from the allocator perspective. As private markets have become larger and more competitive, strong investment returns remain fundamental, but managers are increasingly being judged on transparency, timeliness, and the overall experience they provide their investors. 

From document extraction to data infrastructure

A major theme of the discussion is the distinction between improving the way documents are processed and rethinking why the industry relies on documents in the first place.

Today, much of private-markets technology focuses on extracting information from PDFs, spreadsheets, and portals and moving it into downstream systems. These tools solve an important problem, but Griff describes a different long-term ambition: straight-through data processing, where information can move directly between systems rather than repeatedly being packaged into documents and extracted again. 

That is the role Daphne is building toward. Daphne sits between the GP and the allocator or investment platform, receiving data from the authoritative source, translating it into the recipient’s required structure, and delivering it directly into their systems. Daphne is not an investor portal or CRM; it is the permissioned data and translation layer between the two sides. 

At Hamilton Lane, this means GP data can flow through Daphne into the systems used by its investment teams without analysts manually extracting and reformatting information before it can be used. 

Permissioning without forcing a standard

Private-market data is sensitive, which means better connectivity cannot come at the expense of GP control. The podcast explores how Daphne gives managers the ability to review and authorize the information they share with each recipient, while also allowing them to reuse data they have already provided rather than starting from a new template every time. 

That leads to another important distinction: translation rather than standardization.

Private markets have made repeated attempts to create universal reporting standards, but different allocators have different investment processes, risk frameworks, and data requirements. Rather than requiring everyone to adopt one model, Daphne maps between those different structures. As Griff puts it, the objective is to connect the market without forcing firms to replace the systems and data models they already use. 

Infrastructure for the next phase of private markets

As evergreen funds, wealth channels, secondary markets, and new forms of distribution expand, the pressure on private-market infrastructure will only increase. Quarterly, document-heavy processes become increasingly difficult to sustain when investors expect more frequent valuations, greater transparency, and a consolidated view across public and private assets. 

The broader opportunity discussed on Modern Capital is therefore not simply better automation. It is a shift toward an ecosystem in which permissioned data can move directly between the systems used by GPs, allocators, administrators, platforms, and investors.

For Daphne, that is the infrastructure layer we are building: making private-market data easier to share, easier to trust, and easier to use — while keeping the GP in control.