The 14-tab form is the tax

Open a fund ops tool. Pick one. Any one.

You'll be staring at a 14-tab onboarding form. AUM range. Fund count. Strategy. Persona. Vintage. Carry. Hurdle. Integrations. Roles. Permissions. The form is the tax you pay before the product can do anything for you.

Half the people who hit that form never come back. The other half come back, get distracted, and finish it three weeks later — by which point they've forgotten why they signed up. The product never gets a chance to be useful, because the onboarding ate the moment.

What's strange is that almost everything that form is asking, the firm has already filed publicly with the SEC.

What we're doing instead

If you're SEC-registered, the chain looks like this. You type your firm name. We hit the IAPD lookup. We pull your Form ADV Part 1A and Part 2A. We pre-fill: AUM range, fund count, strategy, primary regulators, registration status, investment focus, and ICP cohort. You see what we got, you confirm, and you're in your dashboard with your funds already created.

Total time: under a minute on a clean network.

Not because the underlying work disappeared, but because the work that was always public stopped being something you re-typed.

The three things this changes

Less typing. Six fields most prospects had already shared with the SEC are now a single confirmation step. The persona/AUM/strategy combo that used to be a 90-second slog is a 5-second nod.

Less anxiety about whether the data is right. When the AUM range comes from your latest Part 1A filing, with the filing date and confidence shown right there, there's no question whether to trust it. Wrong year? You override. Confidence too low? It falls back to a one-question manual entry. Nothing silently makes a decision you'll discover three weeks later in a P&L variance flag.

Fewer abandoned setups. This one matters most. The funnel that used to collapse on the firm-profile screen now lands the prospect inside the product, with at least one fund already created, before they've had time to decide they don't have time.

What it isn't

This isn't a replacement for the deeper onboarding work. Connecting Gmail still needs OAuth. Seeding the knowledge base with your past DDQs still benefits from a real upload. Inviting your fractional CFO still needs an invitation. Calibrating the tone of your LP-facing drafts still wants two or three approve/edit cycles to learn how you write.

What it is, is a way to get past the gate. The first useful screen — your fund roster, an Ask Fundry box that actually knows your firm exists, an empty review queue ready for its first DDQ upload — shows up before you've second-guessed signing up.

The boring parts that make it work

Two pieces of plumbing do most of the lifting.

The first is the SEC IAPD bulk index. Roughly 16,000 SEC-registered firms are in there. We pre-ingest filings, normalize the parts that vary across years, and resolve "which CRD is this firm" deterministically when the user types. There is no LLM in that path; it's a search problem with a reasonable canonical answer.

The second is a confidence merger. Different fields in Form ADV come with different reliability. AUM range from Part 1A Item 5.F is high-confidence and time-stamped. Investment focus from Part 2A Item 8 is medium-confidence because it's prose. Cohort assignment is a derived inference. We surface the confidence per field, not as a single overall score, so you know which prefills to glance at and which to actually read.

When confidence is low, we don't guess. We fall back to one targeted question — a single question, not a section — and let you answer it.

What this is for

Magic onboarding isn't a marketing line. It's a product gate. Nothing past the gate matters if prospects never see it.

If you're a CFO at a sub-$500M fund and your last vendor onboarding took an afternoon and ended in a half-finished setup that nobody finished, this is the thing we built so the next one doesn't.

Try it on /signup. If your firm's not SEC-registered — most family offices and several of our smallest GP customers aren't — the flow falls back to a fast manual path. Either way, you're in the product before you've had time to regret showing up.