JPMorgan Chase has announced it is acquiring a data analytics provider for startup investors. The platform is called Aumni and is based in the US.

The bank is buying the 5-year-old Utah company as part of a broader push to deepen relationships with venture capital investors and their companies. While terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, JPMorgan is paying roughly what the startup was valued for at its last fundraising in 2021. Aumni was worth USD 232 million after that round, according to PitchBook.

The service will be integrated with JPMorgan’s private markets platform, Capital Connect, which came out of stealth mode last year. It also complements the bank’s acquisition last year of Global Shares, a software provider for managing employee stock plans. The broader goal is to become the digital destination for VCs, startup founders and other investors to raise money, network and tap loans.

The deal is the latest in a string of fintech acquisitions. Since 2020, JPMorgan has bought a half-dozen startups to bolster its capabilities in areas from payments to ESG investing. The company’s technology investments have come under scrutiny recently amid the bank’s rising expenses and an acrimonious legal dispute over a 2021 acquisition.

JPMorgan Chase dives into the data analytics market JPMorgan decided to buy Aumni after leading its 2021 investment round. Founded in 2018, Aumni is a data platform that helps users analyse and understand their holdings via a simple dashboard. Most of the VC industry still uses Microsoft Excel or similar products to track investments in portfolio companies.

This can make gleaning insights into their holdings difficult, as contracts underpinning a single equity round can exceed 600 pages of dense legal writing. As JPMorgan representatives see it, the moment you want to start performing any type of data science inquiries into your existing investment activity, it becomes a really large undertaking to track down that information accurately, put it into Excel, and then perform the work. The SVB collapse influence Investors leaned on Aumni in recent weeks after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank sent shock waves through the startup community.

Due to worries over uninsured deposits at midsized banks, VCs suddenly wanted to know where their portfolio companies banked, and whether they had legal rights to inspect their financial books. The startup has data on almost 18,000 portfolio companies valued at a total of USD 3. 6 trillion.

It charges an annual subscription fee based on assets under management and the number of companies tracked. .