Ontra is expanding its suite of industry specific, AI-powered software solutions for private equity (PE) firms and asset managers with the launch of three new products designed to tackle some of their most persistent operational bottlenecks.
Announced today, the new tools — Insight for Credit, AI-powered Due Diligence Questionnaires (DDQ), and a human-in-the-loop Know Your Customer (KYC) service — mark a significant step in the company’s effort to deliver verticalized AI infrastructure for private markets.
The launch follows a $70 million funding round, bringing Ontra’s total raised to $325 million across equity and debt. The capital supports continued product development and expansion, particularly in building a platform that integrates AI with domain-specific workflows and expert oversight.
“We're not just delivering AI as a tool,” says Ontra founder and CEO Troy Pospisil in a video call interview with VentureBeat last week. “We're integrating AI into a product that solves a specific problem — combining AI, workflow, and where necessary, human-in-the-loop — to get the accuracy and specificity required for that problem.”
What is Ontra?
Ontra (formerly InCloudCounsel) provides AI-powered software built specifically for private market firms, including private equity, venture capital, private credit, real estate, infrastructure, and hedge funds.
Its platform is designed to automate and streamline legal and compliance workflows that have historically been manual, fragmented, and difficult to scale using horizontal software. It combines advanced AI with a global network of experienced lawyers to streamline repetitive contract tasks, obligation tracking, entity management, document workflows, and more.
Founded before the generative AI revolution in 2014 by Pospisil, a former private equity investor, the company emerged in response to industry-specific challenges he experienced firsthand.
“I left private equity 11 years ago to start a company that could streamline and automate the painful, manual workflows in asset management,” he says. “We bootstrapped for five years, built a strong customer base, and eventually partnered with Blackstone and Battery Ventures to expand into a multi-product platform.”
Who uses Ontra?
Ontra’s platform supports hundreds of enterprise clients, especially within the financial services and private capital markets sectors.
As of mid-2025, Ontra has processed over 2 million documents, and is now used by over 1,000 firms globally — including nine of the top ten private equity firms by assets under management. Among its customers: Blackstone, AllianceBernstein, Bain Capital Credit, Warburg Pincus, Houlihan Lokey, and Sentinel Capital Partners.
These organizations rely on the platform to manage obligations to investors, handle compliance requirements, and streamline document-heavy processes like credit tracking, diligence responses, and KYC.
These customers turn to Ontra to reduce manual legal workloads, improve contract visibility and compliance, and free up internal resources for higher-value tasks—all while benefiting from robust AI capabilities and expert human oversight.
CTO Eric Hawkins joined after seeing "the power of purpose-built platforms at AppFolio, where we transformed property management from Excel and QuickBooks into a unified, cloud-based system,” he told VenureBeat. “That same opportunity exists in private markets, which have been underserved by generic tools.”
Narrow aperture, tightly focused — showing the promise of building targeted B2B AI solutions
While the number of potential customers — around 15,000 global private fund managers — may seem narrow compared to other sectors, the spending capacity of each customer is substantial. “It’s not the number of firms that matters,” says Hawkins. “It’s their spending capability. These are high-end enterprise sales where the average contract values can be quite large.”From Static Documents to Structured Intelligence
The new releases aim to reduce the friction private equity firms face in managing complex processes like credit tracking, investor diligence, and compliance.
The new Insight for Credit feature targets the longstanding inefficiencies in how firms manage credit agreements and debt covenants.
“These firms originate debt and negotiate large legal agreements to define the terms, covenants, and obligations,” Hawkins explains. “This system uses AI to pull all that information out of these legal agreements, get it structured, and make it actionable — with reminders, triggers, and everything done in a systematic and accurate way.”
Customers can simply upload their credit agreements, and the platform extracts the relevant information without requiring manual configuration. “There really is no configuration obligation,” Hawkins adds. “We’ve done the work to train our AI on the diversity of contracts in the industry so they don’t have to configure or prompt anything—it just works.”
Speeding Up Diligence and Compliance
Ontra’s second product, a new AI-powered Due Diligence Questionnaire (DDQ) solution, is designed to help fund managers keep up with rising investor expectations without introducing errors or delays.
“The traditional, manual approach is inefficient and risky,” the company noted in its announcement. The DDQ tool centralizes and standardizes responses with AI-suggested content and a living knowledge base. This helps eliminate the time spent searching through outdated documents and reduces response friction with limited partners (LPs). The tool is currently in limited beta and expected to roll out more broadly before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the upcoming KYC service provides a fully outsourced, human-in-the-loop compliance model. As firms face a growing number of reverse KYC requests from counterparties and vendors, the new service offers a structured, predictable way to handle them. Ontra is currently running the service in beta with selected partners, with a full launch planned for this fall.
Vertical Advantage
While legal tech and AI tooling is a crowded space—with names like Ironclad, Diligent, Robin AI, and Harvey grabbing headlines—Ontra differentiates itself by being purpose-built for private markets rather than retrofitting horizontal tools.
“These firms are trying to retrofit horizontal tools and generic AI into highly bespoke workflows, and it’s not a good match,” says Hawkins. “Our mission is to provide out-of-the-box solutions that just work—accurate, tailored, and integrated.”
“The problems are complex, but they’re consistent across the industry,” adds Pospisil. “By focusing vertically, we can solve them in a scalable way rather than reinventing the wheel for each customer.”
The company’s product roadmap is heavily shaped by customer collaboration. “We work closely with our 1,000 customers—especially the top firms—to identify pain points, map workflows, and prioritize solutions that align with our platform,” says Pospisil. “It’s a constant, collaborative process.”
A Shifting, Expanding Market
Private equity was once dominated by small partnerships, but that landscape has changed dramatically over the past two decades. “Many of these firms started as small partnerships 20 years ago,” Pospisil says. “Today, they’re global institutions—publicly traded, managing hundreds of billions or even over a trillion dollars, like Blackstone.”
He estimates that roughly half of global investable assets are managed by institutional investors, and 30 to 50 percent of that capital is now allocated to alternative asset classes such as private equity, private credit, real estate, infrastructure, and venture capital. “It’s a massive, global industry that's grown dramatically in the past 20 years,” he adds.
With that growth has come an increase in operational complexity and regulatory burden. Firms need enterprise-grade systems to keep up — especially as retail investors gain more access to alternatives, creating downstream demands for better infrastructure.
Trust and security are essential in this space, and Ontra positions its longevity and certifications as a strength. “We’ve been around long enough that firms trust us,” says Hawkins. “We’ve helped shape their AI governance policies and designed our systems around their strict requirements — from data retention and segregation to full compliance with SOC 2 and ISO standards.”
Tech Without Guesswork
One of Ontra’s key selling points is that its tools work out of the box — without requiring customers to become prompt engineers or configuration specialists. “We don’t expect customers to know which model is best — we handle that,” Hawkins explains. “We’re model-agnostic and continuously evaluate performance across workloads, so they get the right results without added complexity.”
Behind the scenes, Ontra’s system runs continuous evaluations across a variety of large language models to determine the best one for each specific task. The company doesn’t publicly disclose which models it uses, but says it selects and switches between them based on accuracy and performance benchmarks. Customers are not asked to make technical decisions about model configuration, though Ontra can accommodate preferences for specific models when required by enterprise policies.
The company also differentiates by combining automation with human oversight. “We’re focused on integrating AI into products that solve specific problems,” says Pospisil. “That’s how we achieve the level of accuracy and specificity needed.”
What's Next for Ontra and customers?
Ontra sees the latest product launches as part of a longer-term evolution toward serving more parts of the private market workflow through a unified platform.
“We’ve got a bunch of new products launching in the next few weeks,” says Pospisil. “It’s part of our continued evolution to do more for our customers in an interconnected platform where they can streamline and automate their most painful workflows.”
By focusing on precision, security, and relevance to its target market, Ontra is carving out a distinct role in the increasingly crowded AI software landscape — not by trying to be everything for everyone, but by doing more for a very specific kind of customer.