Private Market Operating System Bridge Closes $5.1 Million Seed Financing, Led by Thicket Ventures
Bridge, the first AI-native operating system purpose-built for private markets allocators, will use the funding to expand its team and accelerate its product rollout.
NEW YORK, Oct. 23, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bridge, the first AI-native operating system purpose-built for private markets allocators, today announced the close of its $5.1 million Seed financing led by Thicket Ventures.
The capital raise will allow Bridge to meet market demand by significantly expanding its team and accelerating product rollout, as the company furthers its mission to power the private markets by consolidating the end-to-end workflow required to manage, evaluate, and access alternative investments into one unified platform.
Founded by Alex Goodwin, formerly of Leonard Green & Partners, and Ayo Ekhator, ex-Blackstone Group, along with a founding engineering team from Microsoft, Uber, and Plaid, Bridge is serving some of the industry’s most sophisticated investors in private markets. These include large-scale wealth management firms, RIAs, family offices, and institutional investors.
"AI is enabling us to fundamentally reimagine the infrastructure on which alternative investments are operated,” said Goodwin, Bridge’s Chief Executive Officer. “We are in the midst of a major inflection point at the intersection of private markets and technology – demand for the asset class continues to skyrocket, while the commercial application of AI has unlocked a new standard for analyzing and reporting on these investments with ease. Bridge is emerging as the platform of choice to address what is a category-defining opportunity.”
Alongside Thicket, co-investors in the round include a mix of highly strategic founders and executives from blue-chip industry names like Bill Lewis (ex-Lazard, ex-Morgan Stanley), Bob White (Bain Capital), Nate Sleeper (CD&R), Dani Fava (Carson Group), Ed Swenson (Dynasty), Molly Bennard (ex-Focus Financial), Peter Lee (Summit Trail Advisors), Chris Piazza (KKR, ex-iCapital), and David Hauser (Vanilla), among others.
In conjunction with the investment, Justin Wisz, Founder and General Partner of Thicket Ventures, will join Bridge’s Board of Directors.
"Bridge is solving the hardest problems for allocators to private markets with an end-to-end solution that scales independently by using AI at its core,” said Wisz. “We see Bridge as the leader of a new paradigm, capitalizing on two of the most relevant trends in finance: the modernization of technology in wealth management and the proliferation of alternative investing. The macro tailwinds behind alts are well demonstrated, and as such, we have been looking for a leading management team to back for some time. Bridge is the most impressive company we have seen in this space, both for the technical capability of its founding team and their novel solution to the operational challenges that RIA’s, family offices and institutions face every day in the $30T market for alternative investments.”
The company raised its first round of funding from friends and family while Goodwin and Ekhator were still incubating the idea during their time at Harvard Business School and were discovered by Thicket after finding quick traction in the market.
“When considering who to partner with, we were extremely focused on putting investors around the table who could add tangible value with their operating experience and industry relationships in a way that would measurably impact the company,” said Ekhator, Bridge’s Chief Operating Officer. “Alongside our supportive group of angel investors, Justin and Thicket’s network of strategic LPs stood out from the pack during our fundraising process. We’re thrilled to be working together.”
About Bridge
Bridge is an agentic operating system that powers digital infrastructure and insights for capital allocators to private markets. The platform encompasses post-trade, business intelligence, and pre-trade solutions for alternative investments, automating manual time-consuming tasks like document aggregation, data extraction, and analytics to unlock top and bottom-line impact for users. The company serves a variety of customer profiles spanning the wealth management, family office, and institutional asset management segments, and is a SOC 2 Type II certified company. Learn more at https://www.bridgeinvest.io/.
About Thicket Ventures
Thicket Ventures is an operator-driven venture group partnered with leading platforms and firms in financial services to identify, evaluate and accelerate ideas that will propel the industry forward with groundbreaking technology. Based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming with partners in San Francisco and New York City, Thicket primarily invests in companies with direct commercial application among the firm’s Limited Partners in financial services. Learn more at https://www.thicketventures.com/.
For Bridge Lisa Aldape, VOCATUS laldape@vocatusllc.com
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